Jeffrey Kluger Quotes

Learning to speak, therefore, and the power it brings of intelligent converse with others, is a most impressive further step along the path of independence ... Learning to walk is especially significant, not only because it is supremely complex, but because it is done in the first year of life.

To a teacher of languages there comes a time when the world is but a place of many words and man appears a mere talking animal not much more wonderful than a parrot.

Reading aloud and talking about what we're reading sharpens children's brains. It helps develop their ability to concentrate at length, to solve problems logically, and to express themselves more easily and clearly.

When I was child, I never spoke. Teacher used to write remarks on my note book. My mom sent me to a trainer. I started talking, and it gave me confidence.

From the earliest moments of life, children begin to learn the fundamentals of language. The most powerful influence for effective language development are the verbal interactions with caregivers.

No one has to learn to spell to talk, right? You see a little kid holding a conversation with an adult. He probably doesn't know the words he's saying, but he knows where to fit them to make what he's thinking logical to what you're saying.

If a child cannot speak English the first day at school, that child is not ready to learn.

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

Man is multiplied by the number of languages he possesses and speaks.

Having a larger vocabulary the day you walk into kindergarten is advantageous.

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.

If you can't hear language, you won't be able to understand language and experience normal development. Every minute spent without hearing is a minute a child is not getting back.

It is the children between five and seven who are the word-lovers. It is they who show a predisposition toward such study. Their undeveloped minds can not yet grasp a complete idea with distinctness. They do, however, understand words. And they may be entirely carried away by their ecstatic, their tireless interest in the parts of speech.

It is not easy, but young people have to learn languages.

When I was little, seven or eight years old, in third and fourth grade, I would always try to use long words and stuff.

To learn a new language is, therefore, always a sort of spiritual adventure; it is like a journey of discovery in which we find a new world.

There is a certain age at which a child looks at you in all earnestness and delivers a long, pleased speech in all the true inflections of spoken English, but with not one recognizable syllable. There is no way you can tell the child that if language had been a melody, he had mastered it and done well, but that since it was in fact a sense, he had botched it utterly.

The child begins to perceive the world not only through his [or her] eyes but also through his [or her] speech

See that your children are properly educated in the rudiments of their mother tongue, and then let them proceed to higher branches of learning.

Learning is a result of listening, which in turn leads to even better listening and attentiveness to the other person. In other words, to learn from the child, we must have empathy, and empathy grows as we learn.

There is a certain age at which a child looks at you in all earnestness and delivers a long, pleased speech in all the true inflections of spoken English, but with not one recognizable syllable.

A child raised on a desert island, alone, without social interaction, without language, and thus lacking empathy, is still a sentient being.

As a graduate student, I wrote a long paper connecting the dots between mathematical models of learning and language development in children. It was published in a major journal.

Learning another language is not only learning different words for the same things, but learning another way to think about things.

Since I learned English, I've become a motormouth!