Foreign Language Study Quotes

we seem to be on a constant quest to keep America a country of citizens who can only talk to one another ~ Kari Martindale

Every now and then we find ourselves living through moments that make no sense at all. It's almost as if some omnipotent film editor has snipped us out of our familiar everyday movie and spliced us into something completely random, from a different time and genre and even from a foreign country and partially animated, because suddenly you look around you and the language is unknown and nothing that happens has any relationship to what you think of as reality. This ~ Jeff Lindsay

Insanity is the inability to communicate your ideas. It's as if you were in a foreign country, able to see and understand everything that's going on around you but incapable of explaining what you need to know or of being helped, because you don't understand the language they speak there. We've all felt that. And all of us, one way or another, are insane. ~ Paulo Coelho

In the mid-nineteenth century, Jeremiah Curtin, an Irish-American who had learned Irish, traveled throughout the Irish-speaking enclaves in Connacht and discovered hundreds of previously unrecorded stories. He recorded them in their original language and greatly advanced the study of Irish folklore. At ~ Ryan Hackney

I swear conversation is such hard work! To make myself understood, it's like I have to speak in an unknown foreign language, every minute of every day.'
'The Reason I Jump' by Naoki Higashida ~ Naoki Higashida

Americans don't speak foreign languages, by and large. Their interest in anything beyond the borders of the country is limited. A European of any cultivation has to speak a couple of languages; he inevitably without being very thoughtful about it gets to understand what other people think about him. ~ Arthur Miller

A werewolf. He said the word like he was learning a foreign language and wanted to get the accent right. ~ Tielle St. Clare

The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words HOME, CHRIST, ALE, MASTER, on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language. ~ James Joyce

If the third dimension and perceptions of sacredness are an important part of human nature, then the scientific community should accept religiosity as a normal and healthy aspect of human nature - an aspect that is as deep, important, and interesting as sexuality or language (which we study intensely). Here's another treasonous thought: If religious people are right in believing that religion is the source of their greatest happiness, then maybe the rest of us who are looking for happiness and meaning can learn something from them, whether or not we believe in God. That's the topic of the final chapter. ~ Jonathan Haidt

Because you cannot study the acquisition or use of language in an intelligent manner without having some idea about this language which is acquired or utilized. ~ Noam Chomsky

Pauley Perrette: I was a criminal science fanatic and went to study it in college as well and I think that helped me on NCIS because I was comfortable with the language, I had studied criminal science in school for years. ~ Pauley Perrette

There are human boys here somewhere?" Zoey asked.
Aurox's face scrunched up as he frowned at her. "Not here. Outside - out there. " He pointed in the general direction of the door to the field house behind them.
"Outside the field house!" she almost yelled.
"Zo, sometimes I think you don't listen so good," Aurox said. Still frowning at her, he continued speaking slowly, as if trying to get her to understand a foreign language.
"Two boys. Outside the wall. With the keg. And cups. They. Want. Hot. Vampyre. Chicks."
"Okay, I think I get it." Stark grabbed Aurox's arm and started to drag him toward the door and away from Z
before she went for his throat, although that would have been funny as hell. "You found two kids, with beer, trying to get over the wall, right?"
"See, you listen better." Aurox patted him on the back, almost knocking Stark over. "But they're just looking through the hole for vampyre pussy, not trying to get over the wall."
"If you say pussy one more time I'm going to smack the crap out of you," Zoey said, coming after them.
"You can't come!" Aurox stumbled to a stop. "You have legs and tits!"
"Oh. My. Goddess. I'm going to kill him!" Stark stepped between the two of them. He faced Zoey.
She'd gone from pale to bright red in zero-point-nothing seconds. "Z, I think this is something that a Warrior needs to handle."
Behind him, Aurox belched, sending a wave of beer air wafting over them.
Zoey narrow ~ Kristin Cast

Syntax is the study of the principles and processes by which sentences are constructed in particular languages. Syntactic investigation of a given language has as its goal the construction of a grammar that can be viewed as a device of some sort for producing the sentences of the language under analysis. ~ Noam Chomsky

Words tend to bounce off nature as they try to deliver nature's language into the hands of another language foreign to it. ~ Theodor Adorno

While Egyptian speakers learned Greek, it was rare that anyone ventured in the opposite direction. To the punishing study of Egyptian, however, Cleopatra applied herself. She was allegedly the first and only Ptolemy to bother to learn the language of the 7 million people over whom she ruled. ~ Stacy Schiff

How do you small-talk your father when "dad" is a language so foreign that whenever you try to say it, it feels like you got a third lip and a second tongue? ~ Jason Reynolds

The language of the land in the Parthian empire was the native language of Iran. There is no trace pointing to any foreign language having ever been in public use under the Arsacids. ~ Theodor Mommsen

Epicurus (341-270 B.C.) was the last major Greek philosopher of the classical era to make significant original contributions to the study of language, developing a socio-anthropological theory of the origin of language. ~ Richard E. McDorman

Hard as I try, daddy-o, I really do not like concert singers. They are always singing in some foreign language. ~ Langston Hughes

A common creation demands a common sacrifice, and perhaps not the least potent argument in favour of a constructed international language is the fact that it is equally foreign, or apparently so, to the traditions of all nationalities. ~ Edward Sapir

I love watching old movies, and some of the holiday-themed ones are really great. I also have a bizarre thing that I'll do: I'll turn on a foreign-language TV station, usually Spanish, and watch a whole show, riveted, even though I have no idea what anyone is saying. I don't know why I find that so addictive, but I do! ~ John Travolta

Language leads a double life - and so does the novelist. You chat with family and friends, you attend to your correspondence, you consult menus and shopping lists, you observe road signs, and so on. Then you enter your study, where language exists in quite another form - as the stuff of patterned artifice. ~ Martin Amis

This is why tyrants of all stripes, infernal servants, have such deep-seated hatred for the nomads - this is why they persecute the Gypsies and the Jews, and why they force all free peoples to settle, assigning the addresses that serve as our sentences.
What they want is to create a frozen order, to falsify time's passage. They want for the days to repeat themselves, unchanging, they want to build a big machine where every creature will be forced to take its place and carry out false actions. Institutions and offices, stamps,newsletters, a hierarchy, and ranks, degrees, applications and rejections, passports, numbers, cards, elections results, sales and amassing points, collecting, exchanging some things for others.
What they want is to pin down the world with the aid of barcodes, labelling all things, letting it be known that everything is a commodity, that this is how much it will cost you. Let this new foreign language be illegible to humans, let it be read exclusively by automatons, machines. That way by night, in their great underground shops, they can organize reading of their own barcoded poetry.

Move. Get going. Blesses is he who leaves. ~ Olga Tokarczuk

If language is intimately related to being human, then when we study language we are, to a remarkable degree, studying human nature. ~ Charlton Laird

The Word

Wonder or dream from distant land
I carried to my country's strand

And waited till the twilit norn
Had found the name within her bourn -

Then I could grasp it close and strong
It blooms and shines now the front along...

Once I returned from happy sail,
I had a prize so rich and frail,

She sought for long and tidings told:
"No like of this these depths enfold."

And straight it vanished from my hand,
The treasure never graced my land...

So I renounced and sadly see:
Where word breaks off no thing may be. ~ Stefan George

She would be afraid to fly when it came to it, and the rest of the world is not so interesting, Jacob, only different people doing the same things in a foreign language. pg. 198 ~ Samantha Harvey

When you begin to read a poem you are entering a foreign country whose laws and language and life are a kind of translation of your own; but to accept it because its stews taste exactly like your old mother's hash, or to reject it because the owl-headed goddess of wisdom in its temple is fatter than the Statue of Liberty, is an equal mark of that want of imagination, that inaccessibility to experience, of which each of us who dies a natural death will die. ~ Randall Jarrell

One who has just learnt a foreign language, constantly resorts, while talking, to words belonging to that language in order to make a show of his or her achievement. But one who knows the language well, seldom uses it when speaking in his or her own mother tongue. Such is the case with those who are well advanced in religion. ~ Abhijit Naskar

A cheery receptionist met Donovan as he entered and said something with an upside-down question mark at the beginning. ~ Steven Brust

Since every school in India teaches English, why can't it be our link language? Why do Tamils have to study English for communication with the world and Hindi for communications within India? Do we need a big door for the big dog and a small door for the small dog? I say, let the small dog use the big door too! ~ C. N. Annadurai

The first few weeks football players look at you like you are speaking a foreign language. My job is to get them to trust me, trust the system. I ask them to run in a way that makes no sense to them. ~ Ato Boldon

To those of you who study history, economics, sociology, literature and language I present the challenge of the utilization of the enormous resources in our grasp to the problem of creating a genuinely good life for yourselves and your children. ~ Polykarp Kusch

No matter where I go in the world, although I can't speak any foreign language, I don't feel out of place. I think of earth as my home. If everyone thought this way, people might notice just how foolish international friction is and they would put an end to it. ~ Akira Kurosawa

It's fun when the writers start writing jokes to you, but also it's fun when the writers will come to you and say 'Hey, listen, we're working on this story and we need to know if you speak any foreign languages.' And I said 'No, I don't. I speak a little Spanish, but I can learn a foreign language.' And they go 'Okay, do you think you can learn Portuguese?' And I go 'Yeah, whatever it takes. If it's funny, I'll do it.' So of course I start looking online and learning Portuguese, and as it turns out, I get the script and it's now Serbian. ~ David Alan Basche

Go to the place where the thing you wish to know is native; your best teacher is there. Where the thing you wish to know is so dominant that you must breathe its very atmosphere, there teaching is moat thorough, and learning is most easy. You acquire a language most readily in the country where it is spoken; you study mineralogy boat among miners; and so with everything else. ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Can we reconcile indefinitely these two imperatives: the desire to preserve every individual's special identity and the need for Europeans to be able to communicate with one another all the time and as freely as possible? We cannot leave it to time to solve the dilemma and prevent people from engaging, a few years hence, in bitter and fruitless linguistic conflicts. We know all too well what time will do.
The only possible answer is a voluntary policy aimed at strengthening linguistic diversity and based on a simple idea: nowadays everybody obviously needs three languages. The first is his language of identity; the third is English. Between the two we have to promote a third language, freely chosen, which will often but not always be another European language. This will be for everyone the main foreign language taught at school, but it will also be much more than that
the language of the heart, the adopted language, the language you have married, the language you love. ~ Amin Maalouf

The history of religions, of which Christianity is a transcendent element, awaits the deepest study. It requires Bibles to free from Bibles. Comparative theology is the best of studies for liberating one's mind from geographical and traditional limitations. Like travelling, it shows the globe in its varying climates and zones, its latitude and longitude of intelligence. When the races shall have learned each other's language, the significance of things to thoughts, one faith becomes universal, one brotherhood. ~ Amos Bronson Alcott

I am a bohemian person. I don't speak German, and I live in a foreign country where all the signs are in German. I did that deliberately. I'm like a ghost. Look at how much media and advertising you're subjected to, this mindless chatter of advertising. I just block it out so effortlessly because it's all a foreign language to me. It's really a good thing for my head, living in Berlin. ~ Anton Newcombe

Remember that, however patient your study, you will never in adult life learn any language perfectly; the best you can hope for is to be a bore. ~ Evelyn Waugh

And so all great music,
great prose,
everything beautiful
must depend upon the sure,
free measure with which it is gardened
and put into language for the people,
for each lovely thing
has its intrinsic value
and belongs in its own position
for the world to study,
understand and thrive upon. ~ Robert Henri