Elif Safak Quotes

When you're speaking Spanish, you're thinking in a different way.

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

I consider myself a pretty good conversationalist, but you wind up being downgraded to idiot status when you don't speak the language!

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 have every reason to believe that an individual man or woman fluent in several tongues seduces, possesses, remembers differently according to his or her use of the relevant language.

People who grow up with two or more languages understand that each can express certain aspects of reality better than the other.

Talking in one language and talking in another, I think inevitably, produce two different personalities, as far as I've seen in other people. I assume it does the same for me.

Some languages expand not only your ability to speak to different people but what you're able to think.

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

I think the best part of learning a language is that you can see the country's culture through the language. And it gives you different levels of understanding of that culture when you really try to dig in and learn it.

I think once you understand a language, you understand the culture surrounding it as well.

Each language is a different lens from through which you view the world. So, learn as much as you can!

It's rare to find an Indian who speaks Chinese. It's rare to find a Chinese who can speak any of the Indian languages. Neither of them at the trading level - I want to repeat this, at the trading level - can speak English, either.

This universe can very well be expressed in words and syllables which are not those of one's mother tongue.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

I don't speak Filipino or Spanish, but I've sung in both.

I never found it frustrating not speaking.

There are very few places in the world where you have to learn a language with no language in common. It's called a monolingual field situation.

I have a funny accent in every language.

Every language teaches you something, so learning a language is never wasted, especially if it's different in more than just syntactic trivia.

Prior to 'Snowpiercer,' I've done many other international project that forced me to be in an environment where I had to converse in English.

It's funny because I'm so used to acting in English that any time I have these moments where I have to speak Russian, it definitely takes a different part of my brain to pull it off, but it's always nice and fun.

My mom used to call me a parrot, because the way I spoke would change in every country we'd go to.

I'm a professor of comparative literature, among other things, so I'm able to read in a couple of other languages, and I understand that not everyone is, not everyone can, although it is quite stunning how many people do read Spanish in the United States, but moving between languages is also extremely helpful.

I speak African. I can even speak Italian.