Billy Sunday Quotes

I really wanted to speak English because I started touring the world, and I wanted to communicate with people directly.

I'm not exactly an example of how to learn English; I just can't get it into my head. I'm learning hardly anything, truth be told.

I am used to being places where I don't speak the language. What I am not used to is being in a part of a country where few people speak my language. Call it ignorance, arrogance, or what have you, but most places I have visited, I was lucky enough to be able to get by with English.

I can't learn Swedish to save my life. I tried, but I'm not very good at it.

The English language is not always the President's friend.

Nothing in my younger life could have told me I would have needed to know how to speak English.

I realized very early in life what my abilities and limitations were, and foreign languages was definitely one of my limitations. With strenuous effort, I just barely passed my French class at Harvard so I could graduate.

English is not my first language.

Well, maybe so, although I don't think I am particularly gifted in languages. In fact, oddly enough, it may have something to do with my being slow at languages.

I learned English kind of late. I remember when I got my first opportunity to work in America, I didn't speak a lot of English, so I only really knew my lines for the movie I was doing.

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.

Move beyond the educated elite, and the great majority in most countries outside Europe don't speak English.

You close the door on me and tell me I can't, I'm gonna find a way to get in.

It took me a year to really learn the American lingo. I really feel for people who are coming here and don't speak English at all. It must be hell.

One of the biggest problems is - you know, I've got some Hispanic friends - is that a lot of those folks that don't know English, is primarily because they don't even know Spanish. They don't even know their own language.

Even though many Indians can read or speak English, for most, it is not their first language. At the office, we speak in English, but we consume our culture in our own language.

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!

More has been screwed up on the battlefield and misunderstood in the Pentagon because of a lack of understanding of the English language than any other single factor.

If a child cannot speak English the first day at school, that child is not ready to learn.

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.

[Referring to immigrants:] They're all over the place, and they don't speak English. Do we want more of this?

When I first came to this country I could not speak English. Now I get paid to write it.

In Korean, my lyrics are witty and have twists. But translated into English, it doesn't come over. I've tried writing in English, just for me, but it doesn't work. I've got to know everything about a culture, and I don't.

To the Tamil media, I have mostly interacted in English since I am not fluent in Tamil.

I can speak Cantonese, but I can't speak about fashion - I learnt all my fashion in Europe, so often, during interviews in Chinese I just don't know the right word - it can be very hard to explain things.