Sandra Cisneros Quotes

I've studied Chinese in college, but basically, I'm not bilingual.

I don't speak Spanish, I speak a little of Italian but no Spanish.

I learned French before I learned Spanish.

I speak a little Spanish but I am so impressed by people who can speak a lot of different languages.

I studied in American school, so yes, I grew up speaking English and Spanish. Obviously, Spanish is my first language.

Italian was my first foreign language. I speak it better than English.

If you spend your time trying to learn English, you fall behind in your course content… I know because when I came here I could not speak English. So that was the idea of Congress when we passed bi-lingual education. But that was to only go on for a short time—one and one half years. But many of the bi-lingual education programs of today go on for year after year and they are destructive because the primary objective is to learn English.

Bilingual education doesn’t work, and it has never worked.

I learned Punjabi before I learned English in spite of the fact that I was born in Canada.

No man fully capable of his own language ever masters another.

I speak English, so I am no longer cute. My tongue itches for French.

If you were to ask me to speak Swedish or Dutch or German, I have no idea if I could pull that off!

In English, I'm a little bit limited. I speak English as a second language, and that's a little limitation that I have to work around and I have to use it to my favor. So, yes, that's why I end up wanting to do more things in Latin America.

I don't speak Filipino or Spanish, but I've sung in both.

I don't speak Spanish, and I get so much crap for it. Oddly enough, it was the first language I learned, but somehow I lost it throughout the years. I can understand pieces of it, but I don't speak it. I need to speak it. I want to teach my kids Spanish.

I had the luck that my parents educated me in three languages. With my mother I spoke Dutch, with my father Italian, and in the school I learned German. But my host language is Italian.

My mom taught me German before I knew English. And I went to French immersion school.

I never found accents difficult, after learning languages.

I speak English without an accent, and I speak Spanish without an accent. I really do have the best of both worlds.

I have never been particularly good with languages. Despite a dozen years of Hebrew school and a lifetime of praying in the language, I'm ashamed to admit that I still can't read an Israeli newspaper. Besides English, the only language I speak with any degree of fluency is Spanish.

I came here when I was almost 22. I'm perfectly bilingual, but I'm never going to sound like Sandra Bullock.

I think it's important if you're American to have a second language, and Spanish is the language to have.

I speak Spanish to my children and they speak it better than me.

I'm trying to talk to my kids in Japanese, because I'm not a pro English speaker. My wife speaks to them in English. That's her first language. I don't want my kids to feel the same as me when I was studying English. It was so frustrating.

When you grow up in a family of languages, you develop a kind of casual fluency, so that languages, though differently colored, all seem transparent to experience.