David Remnick 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!

When I came back from Bolivia, my Spanish was in some ways as good as my English. I am rusty today. But I am comfortable talking in Spanish. I am not flawless or fluent, but I am comfortable. It takes me a day or two speaking a lot of Spanish to get back into a rhythm.

To be functionally fluent in a language, for instance, in most cases you need about 1,200 words. To acquire a total of vocabulary words, if you really train someone well they can acquire 200 to 300 words a day, which means that in a week they can acquire the vocabulary necessary to speak a language.

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.

Russian is a really hard language - but I've got my own personal teacher. He's been really patient.

My French definitely improves the more I drink, as I worry less and less about absolutely perfect grammar. I do speak and understand the language, just not particularly well.

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.

Spanish is my second language. When I started, I was doing interviews in Spanish and had to catch up.

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 study hard at Russian, which is a tough but most attractive language.

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.

I had a quick ear and could pick up languages.

You see failed vocabulary in the adult world so often, and it's often because once you reach a certain age you're kind of embarrassed to go look up a word if you don't know what it means.

I sing in Hungarian. I read Hungarian. I do not pretend to speak Hungarian, but I sing in languages that I have studied as languages. And I find that to be central and very, very helpful. I think if you're not really cognizant of what every single word means, I think that might be a little tricky.

I took about four or five years of French in high school, but I definitely don't speak French as well as I thought I did then.

I'm terrible at languages. I'm trying to learn Spanish. I tried to learn French as a kid.

I have a few close friends with whom I can practice speaking Italian, but I mostly maintain fluency through reading.

My Mandarin is slowly getting worse.

The Malayalam connection has always been there and finally I am trying to learn the language to be active here as well.

Hindi is far easier a language to pick up than Tamil.

I was born and brought up in London, so I couldn't speak Hindi properly. But as I am socialising more with my Hindi speaking friends, I'm getting better at the language.

So Mandarin, I picked it up, I spent a year in Beijing studying but then when you don't use it, languages, you just kinda forget it all.

My father had barely any education. He could hardly write or count. But his great pride was that he was perfectly bilingual. In the household, he entertained this idea that we had to speak both languages.

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

Most of my family speaks fluent Malayalam.