Nick Hornby Quotes

My father's really fluent in French, but I can't speak at all. I actually took it twice in school already and failed both times!

It is not like studying German, where you mull along, in a groping, uncertain way, for thirty years; and at last, just as you think you've got it, they spring the subjunctive on you, and there you are. No- and I see now plainly enough, that the great pity about the German language is, that you can't fall off it and hurt yourself. There is nothing like that feature to make you attend strictly to business.

Remember that, however patient your study, you will never in adult life learn any language perfectly; the best you can hope for is to be a bore.

Study a foreign language if you have opportunity to do so. You may never be called to a land where that language is spoken, but the study will have given you a better understanding of your own tongue or of another tongue you may be asked to acquire.

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

In 1980, shortly before my 11th birthday, I wrote my first essay in English.

It is literally the case that learning languages makes you smarter. The neural networks in the brain strengthen as a result of language learning.

There is a slam-dunk case for extending foreign language teaching to children aged five. Just as some people have taken a perverse pride in not understanding mathematics, so we have taken a perverse pride in the fact that we do not speak foreign languages, and we just need to speak louder in English.

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.

It is no secret that the fruits of language study are in no sort of relation to the labour spent on teaching and learning them.

What I'm interested in is how people are reading and writing English.

The mind of the polyglot is a very particular thing, and scientists are only beginning to look closely at how acquiring a second language influences learning, behavior and the very structure of the brain itself.

Columbia University, where I went to study in 1993, insisted its undergraduates learn a foreign language, so I discovered French.

It's really difficult for me. Language, I am sorry that I haven't. I think I just always expected that you learn a word in place of a word and when I discovered how difficult the grammar was and learning that was very discouraging for me.

I've been working with Spanish, French, some more American, and Japanese directors. And then I realized I have to study English, and that's why I moved to New York two years ago.

All Italians speak Spanish without studying.

Just learning to think in another language allows you to see your own culture in a better viewpoint.

When I'm studying English I love to watch 'Friends' or 'Nikita.'

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

The idea of Homo monolinguis - one-languaged man - the idea of children having to grow into one system before we confuse them with another mental system, is an idea with which, unfortunately, many people are brought up now.

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.

I think that learning Burmese has to have been one of the most challenging things that I have had to do for a movie.

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.

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.

I realize that the wish to write in a new language derives from a kind of desperation.