Richard Masur Quotes

I actually tried to learn the dictionary at one point. It didn't work; I only got through the first few pages.

I learned English from watching American movies and American series. And you'd watch the movie the first time and not understand anything. Then you'd watch it again, and you'd start understanding more and more, and that's how I learned English.

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!

When I first began to combine letters other than Hebrew, I read every book in German that came my way, and from these I certainly received according to the nature of my soul.

I learned how to sign because when I was growing up in California in order to get into college you needed two semesters of language to get into a University of California school.

I have an impeccable memory, and I can learn dialogues in any language in 20 minutes, including Telugu and Malayalam.

Always, as a child, I would go around the house, and if I found a word that I didn't know the meaning of, I would write it down and ask my parents to define it and try to memorise it.

I learned how to speak English watching television.

Your understanding of what you read and hear is, to a very large degree, determined by your vocabulary, so improve your vocabulary daily.

In our generation, everybody told us that it's really important and it's nice to be able to speak a lot of languages. It's an art, too. It really impresses me, people who speak, like, seven languages. I admire them so much, so I began with English, and then Spanish and maybe Portuguese.

I learned by watching my favorite shows. I would just rewind and say the words back, until they sounded right to me. I never studied the American accent, in terms of getting a teacher or taking phonetics classes. I've always been a good mimic. It really wasn't that hard for me.

I went to college, but I learned to write by reading - and writing.

If we were meant to read for enjoyment, would God have created television? Read as it was intended - for exercise. The more you read, the more you expand your - what's the word I'm looking for? - your stockpile of words. You must have a stockpile of words that you can pass along to your children for their stockpile.

When I first came over to the States, I started writing, I think, as a way to help myself learn English. I would start stapling together little booklets for myself.

All the youth ..., who are rich enough to be able to devote themselves to it be set to learn ... until they are able to read English writing well.

I have a good memory for words, and when I come upon a word I don't know, I remember it, or try to - it's almost like a tic. I also just have a good feeling for how words are made and formed in English and the etymologies that give you prefixes and suffixes.

I never really thought I had an extensive vocabulary like that, and I'm not an avid reader. I didn't read a lot growing up - at all.

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.

I can speak Hindi, but I can't sustain it over a whole movie.

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

I started watching English news channels and would repeat after the anchor. Since coaching classes were expensive, I joined a call centre where, after undergoing training for a month, I quit. I followed this strategy in 15 BPOs. I could earn money and learn English at the same time.

I read everything from comics to magazines to fiction - I learned to read in English, years before being able to speak a word of it, by reading 'National Geographic.'

I loved English literature - if didn't it would have been hard - but I had to learn it myself. I remembered ways to repeat words, to put more emphasis on certain lines.

Even if people are suspicious of the motives I think that learning and speaking two languages can only be a good thing for people.

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.