Martin Jacques Quotes

I have been challenged with the fictional languages I have to learn. I wasn't terrible at languages at school - I got an A in French, so I did well enough - but I didn't enjoy them. I'm not even sure if that plays into how well you learn a fictional language!

I never had to learn English, French and German because I was brought up as all three languages. I had a private French teacher before I even went to school. That helped a lot.

English, for me, is an acquired language. I started with English at the age of 10. At the time, it was my third language.

All the kids are learning different languages. I asked them what languages they wanted to learn, and Shi is learning Khmai, which is a Cambodian language; Pax is focusing on Vietnamese, Mad has taken to German and Russian, Z is speaking French, Vivienne really wanted to learn Arabic, and Knox is learning sign language.

I just can't stop doing Telugu films just when I have started speaking a little better Telugu.

Learning German will be always kind of hard to me. But I'm getting the basics right.

I've studied Spanish, but I need to improve. I'll probably improve when I work in the country one day. For most people, when they travel to a country, their language becomes better.

It took me just three months to pick up Hindi. I guess I'm a fast learner when it comes to languages.

Our common language is English. And our common task is to ensure that our non-English-speaking children learn this common language.

It's important to me to work in my own language now and then. I love English, but you can never learn to master a foreign language if you're not brought up with it.

If I had mastered the Spanish language to any extent, I might have gone in that direction.

What's always a challenge for me is that my Spanish is not the level of my English. Nor do I read in Spanish the way I read in English.

I think the biggest difficulty is that when I'm here in America, there's a necessity of using English, so I really have a great sense of really wanting to learn, but unfortunately when I head back to Japan, the necessity vanishes and so does my enthusiasm about learning.

There is a slam-dunk case for extending foreign language teaching to children aged five. Just as some people have taken a perverse pride in not understanding mathematics, so we have taken a perverse pride in the fact that we do not speak foreign languages, and we just need to speak louder in English.

I also had this mistaken dream, fantasy really - perhaps because I'm good at languages - of being able in both Italy and France to become someone else through my fluency in the language.

Even though I have spent literally years of my life trying to learn another language, any other language - and even though I have in the past claimed in several key professional contexts that I speak other languages - I am in fact still trapped inside the bubble of English.

I could never learn to be totally fluent in any other language.

I don't know Arabic. I can't speak or write it.

When I was in Mexico and started to dream in Spanish, I knew that was a good sign that I was learning the language. It was cool.

When I last went to Italy, over two years ago, I had a lot more trouble understanding the language than I used to when I lived there for a year. I used to speak very little but I could understand very well.

The child, merely by going on with his life, learns to speak the language belonging to his race. It is like a mental chemistry that takes place in the child.

The language skill in the U.S. for the most part has been awful. Many Americans don't learn any foreign language.

I am a 10th class pass in Hindi. From 7th grade to 12th grade, I was in Delhi; before that, I was abroad. I came in not knowing a word of Hindi in 7th grade and learned Hindi and passed the exam in 10th. I think I was north of 50 percent, so I feel very proud of that accomplishment.

Growing up in Switzerland, you learn German pretty much from day one in school. You learn French and Italian as well. I took English as an extra language because I figured that was the language of the world.

I can speak Hindi, but I can't sustain it over a whole movie.