Lucio Tan Quotes

More than 300 million people in the world speak English and the rest, it sometimes seems, try to.

When I was 12 years old, I got interested in learning English.

In the space of a decade, China and India have emerged as dramatic, dynamic competitors.

During the 1980s, when Japan's economy was roaring and people were writing books with titles like 'Japan is Number One,' most Japanese college students didn't make the effort to become fluent in English.

Increasingly, corporate executives who don't speak Japanese are coming into Japan. Unlike their predecessors, they expect their employees to be able to communicate in English.

Globalization has brought a proliferation of such environments, so that even monolinguals must increasingly learn to live and act multilingually.

When I first came to this country I could not speak English. Now I get paid to write it.

I learned my English from Keith Spurgeon. He had some small children, and I was young, too, and so we spoke the language together, and it was fantastic.

When I came here I moved to London and I was meeting so many new people and had to speak only in English, which is not my native language.

I arrived in the U.S.A. in 1935, to San Francisco. I got the boat from China, and I didn't even speak English. I could read a little, perhaps write a little, but that was all. It was a 17-day journey, and I learnt to speak English from the stewards.

The duty of an American churchman in China is not simply introducing new ideas into the country, but modifying its industrial, social, and political life and institutions. Missionaries are the pioneers of trade and commerce. Civilization, learning, instruction breed new wants which commerce supplies.

China became an economic power with few equals. By 2010 China gad overtaken Japan as the world’s second largest economy in terms of GDP, China’s transformation consistently drew one ideas beyond it shores.

When I was a kid in junior high, I had an assignment to discuss how to rescue poor people in India. I remember my teacher at the time considered it an impossible problem. Now, we're not talking that way anymore. We're sure not talking about that for China. They're rescuing themselves thanks to globalization.

China adopted a capitalist system in the 1980s, and they went from a 60% poverty rate to 10%.

Mum and Dad sent us to a bilingual school, so we had half the lessons in English and half in French. But I remember being hugely lost.

I believe and still believe that the Chinese government puts great weight on the experience of the Bank in terms of development.

You could imagine a language exactly like English except it doesn't have connectives like 'and' that allow you to make longer expressions. An infant learning truncated English would have no idea about this: They would just pick it up as they would standard English.

I didn't speak English until I was ten, when Philip Burton, the schoolmaster who became my guardian, took me under his wing.

When I was 10 years old, we moved to Spain with my mother. I learned Spanish before I learned English. But the English language stayed with me.

China is certainly an important player in the global economy, and a widespread AIDS epidemic would threaten that growth.

China is just so different from the rest of the world.

China, with its large emerging middle class, is among the big beneficiaries of globalization.

I am learning English and can understand better than I can speak it. But having said that, I am learning as quickly as I can.

Every Hispanic player goes through that. It's a lot of hard work, to be able to communicate with your teammates. English is fundamental to be able to express yourself fully in a game.

You know it was really hard to do a set, or even to do interviews in English, because in Europe, we always had a translator with us.