Masha Gessen Quotes

I learned English, French, Italian.

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.

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.

English is not my first language.

I would love with all my heart to be able to speak Greek, classical or modern or both. It is a beautiful language, both aurally and in terms of the intricacy of its construction. I took four semesters of Ancient Greek in college, but it's all rusted away now - and I never learned to speak it anyway.

I studied German at school. I lived in Berlin for two years and had a German girlfriend for five years, so I don't find speaking German particularly difficult. Singing was slightly more difficult.

I would like to be a polyglot.

French was my first language.

My father's really fluent in French, but I can't speak at all. I actually took it twice in school already and failed both times!

Let's see to it that our children, our young people, learn English.

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

I love Duolingo. I'm learning Spanish on it, and it's such a good way to pass time on flights or the bus.

I grew up speaking Vietnamese - that was my first language because my parents didn't speak any English, and I didn't learn English until I started school.

A man who is ignorant of foreign languages is also ignorant of his own language.

I tried to learn the languages - Italian, Spanish, and German - not to successfully. Working on a European set isn't a hell of a lot different from working on an American set.

The Language Laboratory at Cambridge is a very good way of finding out about grammar and the vocabulary and that's why I learned to read German and later on I added Spanish, the standard European languages.

I am very sorry, but I cannot learn languages. I have tried hard, only to find that men of ordinary capacity can learn Sanskrit in less time that it takes me to buy a German Dictionary

I can get by and chatter and talk and tell funny stories, make people laugh, but I don't have as many words, I don't have the vocabulary. I think if I forced myself to read in Spanish - you know, I always say I'm going to, but I lose my patience reading in Spanish, because I really do read the way a third grader does, mouthing the words. That takes a long time!

I feel pretty stupid that I don't know any foreign languages. I wish I knew French or Arabic or Chinese.

I am fluent in Spanish and I understand French, Italian and Portuguese.

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

Somebody said to me that I speak English almost like somebody for whom English is not their first language.

It's hard for me to perform in English.

English people don't have very good diction. In France you have to pronounce very particularly and clearly, and learning French at an early age helped me enormously.