Linguistic Comprehension Quotes

The fact is that if you have not developed language, you simply don't have access to most of human experience, and if you don't have access to experience, then you're not going to be able to think properly.

The finest words in the world are only vain sounds if you can't understand them. The best sentence? The shortest.

Each day we understand better what the Indians say, and they us, so that very often we are intelligible to each other.

A lot of people who live in Denmark will understand Danish but not necessarily speak it.

Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names. Language alone is meditation.

If I do not speak in a language that can be understood there is little chance for a dialogue.

I could sing in English before I could understand it because I phonetically learned it from the musicals.

He who does not understand a joke, he does not understand Danish.

This made no sense to me, probably because I speak English and have never had a head injury.

These glorious things-words-are man's right alone...Without words we should know no more of each other's hearts and thoughts than the dog knows of his fellow dog....for, if you will consider, you always think to yourself in words, though you do not speak them aloud; and without them all our thoughts would be mere blind longings, feelings which we could not understand ourselves.

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

I can speak a little bit of Hindi but understand every word.

What lives in words is what words were needed to learn.

When words do not enter as factors into a shared situation, either overtly or imaginatively, they operate as pure physical stimuli, not as having a meaning or intellectual value. They set activity running in a given groove, but there is no accompanying conscious purpose or meaning.

People don't talk like this, theytalklikethis. Syllables, words, sentences run together like a watercolour left in the rain. To understand what anyone is saying to us we must separate these noises into words and the words into sentences so that we might in our turn issue a stream of mixed sounds in response.

Out of 1.6 billion Muslims, perhaps only 300 million actually understand the language of the Koran.

While I can't speak Telugu, I do understand the language.

I should as soon think of swimming across Charles River, when I wish to go to Boston, as of reading all my books in originals, when I have them rendered for me in my mother tongue.

If, in fact, one cannot understand English, and at the point in time that one comes to vote, one has to be given a ballot in a different language, does that not mean that one is also most likely unable to understand the debate that occurred prior to the decision one makes to vote?

You who read me, are You sure of understanding my language?

I hate not understanding the words, because it kind of squashes the song. It shrinks the visual landscape that you've made for the sounds. And, all of a sudden, the content eclipses things.