Maria Montessori Quotes

See that your children are properly educated in the rudiments of their mother tongue, and then let them proceed to higher branches of learning.

The little child learns to speak, though it has no learned teachers - because it lives with those who know how to speak.

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.

My first public impression was my French teacher, Derek Swift.

From the earliest moments of life, children begin to learn the fundamentals of language. The most powerful influence for effective language development are the verbal interactions with caregivers.

Children frequently sing meaningful phrases to themselves over and over again before they learn to make a distinction between singing and saying.

Learning a foreign language, and the culture that goes with it, is one of the most useful things we can do to broaden the empathy and imaginative sympathy and cultural outlook of children.

To a teacher of languages there comes a time when the world is but a place of many words and man appears a mere talking animal not much more wonderful than a parrot.

After this, I took private lessons in Italian from an elementary school teacher. He gave me themes to write about, and some of them turned out so well that he told me to publish them in a newspaper.

I'm all self-taught. I never had a teacher. Even for English, and French, and German, I hardly went to school.

Let's see to it that our children, our young people, learn English.

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.

My father was a teacher of the Russian language and literature in high school.

I listen to people talking sometimes, that great river that is language, with all its undercurrents of grammar and nuance, and I wonder how we all learn so quickly to speak it, given that we begin when we are barely old enough to stand upright. I have no memory of finding it hard. Indeed, I have no memory of it at all.

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.

Little children can learn anything, just as they can learn a foreign language. The mind is so absorbent then. There ought to be a real program to educate teachers who want to teach grade school children about history.

One of the first things that my English teacher told when I began studying in New York was, "You're here because if you pick it up from the street, not everyone speaks good English." And it happens all the time, anywhere. If you pick up Spanish from the streets, you're not going to be able to speak it correctly.

Children must receive music instruction as naturally as food, with as much pleasure as they derive from a ball game, and this must happen from the beginning of their lives.

Fatherhood is helping your children learn English as a foreign language.

If learning to read was as easy as learning to talk, as some writers claim, many more children would learn to read on their own. The fact that they do not, despite their being surrounded by print, suggests that learning to read is not a spontaneous or simple skill.

Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality. I have been for many years a teacher of languages. It is an occupation which at length becomes fatal to whatever share of imagination, observation, and insight an ordinary person may be heir to. To a teacher of languages there comes a time when the world is but a place of many words and man appears a mere talking animal not much more wonderful than a parrot.

I listen a lot to how people speak. I've read a great many good books in my life. I had some excellent English teachers. Surely, those things were helpful.

Every American child should grow up knowing a second language, preferably English.

Teachers, who educate children, deserve more honour than parents, who merely gave them birth; for the latter provided mere life, while the former ensure a good life.

We do not for example say that the person has a perfect knowledge of some language L similar to English but still different from it. What we say is that the child or foreigner has a 'partial knowledge of English' or is 'on his or her way' towards acquiring knowledge of English, and if they reach this goal, they will then know English.