Amruta Khanvilkar Quotes

When I was a kid, I resented my grandparents not speaking the perfect English I wanted to speak.

When I moved to Bombay, it was very harsh. I was nothing like what I am today. I couldn't speak a word of English. In England, people might be very understanding about that, but in Bombay, they're not very forgiving. 'If you don't speak English, how do you expect to work in Hindi films?'

I've found that one's language abilities, especially for Korean kids like me, get frozen at the age you immigrated. So I've always associated Korea with being a child and being infantilized through my inability to speak.

I still have an accent. But when I return to Prague, I speak the language yet do not know what they are talking about.

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.

I went to an English school and was brought up in English. So I don't feel Czech.

Bilingualism used to have an undeservedly bad reputation; then it got an undeservedly exalted one.

It is very difficult to work in another language, and it is also very challenging.

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.

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

In the British embassy in Afghanistan in 2008, an embassy of 350 people, there were only three people who could speak Dari, the main language of Afghanistan, at a decent level. And there was not a single Pashto speaker.

I was going to be living there and I didn't want to sound like a foreigner all my life.

I came here when I was almost 22. I'm perfectly bilingual, but I'm never going to sound like Sandra Bullock.

This happens to a lot of kids from different backgrounds - they lose a lot of their parents' and grandparents' teachings, language and culture because they have to deal with another language and culture 24/7. By the time I was 44, I was terrible at Spanish. I was always intimidated whenever I had to speak it.

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.

I don't know if I'm truly at home in any language.

I look at myself, and I see a Spanish person who's trying to be understood by an English-speaking audience and is putting a lot of energy into that, instead of into expressing himself freely and feeling comfortable.

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!

Everyone knows English is my second language and my vocabulary is not as broad as it is in Spanish, and because of this, sometimes I use the wrong words to express myself.

Everybody at home speaks mandarin except me.

My wife has a horror the children will start talking American if we spend too much time out there.

The language skill in the U.S. for the most part has been awful. Many Americans don't learn any foreign language.

I had to struggle with the language. I can understand Hindi now, but I still can't communicate. And things get lost in translation; I feel rejected all the time.

You know it was really hard to do a set, or even to do interviews in English, because in Europe, we always had a translator with us.