Maria Montessori Quotes

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.

If I had mastered the Spanish language to any extent, I might have gone in that direction.

It is much easier to learn another language when you are young, enthusiastic and unembarrassed.

Obviously no language is innate. Take any kid from any race, bring them up in any culture and they will learn the language equally quickly. So no particular language is in the genes. But what might be in the genes is the ability to acquire language.

French was my first language.

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 was in Mexico and started to dream in Spanish, I knew that was a good sign that I was learning the language. It was cool.

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.

Apart from English, I speak my mother tongue Malayalam, as well as Tamil, Telugu, and a bit of Kannada and French.

I've been working in three-four languages. I'm happy to do it.

A man who is ignorant of foreign languages is also ignorant of his own language.

There is a certain age at which a child looks at you in all earnestness and delivers a long, pleased speech in all the true inflections of spoken English, but with not one recognizable syllable. There is no way you can tell the child that if language had been a melody, he had mastered it and done well, but that since it was in fact a sense, he had botched it utterly.

We breathe in our first language, and swim in our second.

Our common language is English. And our common task is to ensure that our non-English-speaking children learn this common language.

I spent ten years in London; I trained there. But because I started in English, it kind of feels the most natural to me, to act in English, which is a strange thing. My language is Spanish; I grew up in Argentina. I speak to my family in Spanish, but if you were to ask me what language I connect with, it'd be English in some weird way.

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 speak Hindi fluently because my mother speaks only in Hindi and Urdu.

If you have the language gift, you can use it as a tool.

I had a quick ear and could pick up languages.

I learnt to sing in Bengali, my mother tongue, then went on to sing in Hindi, Telugu, Tamil, Gujarati and every possible Indian language.

I learned Spanish at home and, since half my family doesn't speak English, it's my first language.

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.

Foreign languages are another favourite topic, and as these men are bilingual they have a fair notion of what it means to speak and think in many different idioms.

I never had to learn English, French and German because I was brought up as all three languages. I had a private French teacher before I even went to school. That helped a lot.