Cultural Fluency Quotes

If you're playing with somebody from another idiom, you can't react to them in the same way that you react to somebody that is closer to your idiom. You don't fall into the same habits. You find a new way of communicating.

It's funny because I feel like growing up in Europe and having these different experiences, I feel like I can talk to anybody. I'm always comfortable in every situation that I go in, and that helps me on the court.

It [being an immigrant] gave me a huge advantage. Being an immigrant is the best of both worlds. You’re programmed two different ways. You’re bringing the best from your culture—and Hispanic culture has so many great things—and mixing it with the greatest country in the world. That gives us an advantage in comparison to somebody who was born in the U.S., went to school here, and the U.S. is all they’ve seen. We’ve seen the other side.

I am 100% proud Puerto Rican but have lived two-thirds of my life in the United States. So, there will be some things I write in English, but my main way of conversing with my audience is in Spanish because, at the end of the day, I'm a Latino.

Genuine cosmopolitanism is a rare thing. It requires comfort with real difference, with forms of life that are truly exotic relative to one's own.

I was lucky to move around different cultures at an early age and have experience of different lifestyles.

With my husband, I do really appreciate the fact that we - even though we're different kinds of Asian, there is a cultural shorthand between us, and I don't have to explain anything. I've dated guys before who weren't Asian-American, and it frustrated me when I would have to defend why beans belong in a dessert.

As you can see, I speak many languages, including the language of sex.

I've always thought that speaking a foreign language from a young age makes you a little bolder when it comes to speaking and doing accents and things like that.

When you experience playing in two different leagues, you learn to adapt; you pick up elements from the best virtues of each culture.

Just learning to think in another language allows you to see your own culture in a better viewpoint.

I'm glad I was faced with different cultures when I was growing up because I wasn't fazed by it. It has been a huge benefit to me; I feel comfortable wherever I go.

There's inherent cultural imbalance whenever you're translating from Chinese to English. Educated Chinese readers are expected not only to know about all the Chinese references - history, language, culture, all this stuff - but to be well-versed in Western references as well.

I think why my content does so well with so many different types of people is because it speaks to everyone. I'll make a Soca music reference, I'll use a Tamil word, I'll do a Jamaican Patois accent. I know about all these people, and I'm not afraid to indulge in their culture.

Coming from the Malayalam sets, when I went to Telugu, people told me that I wasn't acting and that it felt dead. It was very subtle in Malayalam, while it is slightly dramatic in Telugu. It is quite fascinating to understand what each industry expects of you and work according to that.

Ang Lee was educated in the West and his English is good.

I think somebody who speaks the language is going to notice immediately that I'm not Russian.

We want our men and women to be closely attuned to the cultures in which they operate and to speak the local language.

You cannot transpose the U.S. system on Turkey, and the Turkish system on France etc. You have to understand the people and their culture. That's leadership.

Culture is our nature, and the ability to learn and change is our most important and fundamental instinct.

I speak English, obviously, Afrikaans, which is a derivative of Dutch that we have in South Africa. And then I speak African languages. So I speak Zulu. I speak Xhosa. I speak Tswana. And I speak Tsonga. And like - so those are my languages of the core. And then I don't claim German, but I can have a conversation in it. So I'm trying to make that officially my seventh language. And then, hopefully, I can learn Spanish.

American histories were the same; they had these mad ideas about how Parliament worked, or what people really meant when they said A, B, or C. All my life, I felt simultaneously deracinated and rooted in both places, and now it's my greatest strength: I'm culturally bilingual.

I am just as comfortable in Britain and France as I am in America... but nowhere is perfect.

I feel like I'm cultured enough to fit into any environment.

American teachers have one indisputable advantage over foreign ones; they understand the American temperament and can judge its unevenness, its lights and its shadows.