Learning Language Quotes

It is literally the case that learning languages makes you smarter. The neural networks in the brain strengthen as a result of language learning. ~ Michael Gove

Oh child, your language is so utterly simple and limited that it has the affect of extreme complication.
-Aunt Beast ~ Madeleine L'Engle

I was pretty good at picking up new languages when I was little, but it's not like I had superpowers or anything.
Kids just have an easier time with words. ~ Brian K. Vaughan

A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language. ~ Gaston Bachelard

For me, French is so rich and so sacred that learning it is like learning a foreign language. ~ Fabrice Luchini

Like a baby learning language, we learn how to communicate with God by listening to His words first. ~ Timothy Keller

Facing a language you don't know is like returning to your infancy when your mother tongue used to be a foreign language to you ~ Munia Khan

You could imagine a language exactly like English except it doesn't have connectives like 'and' that allow you to make longer expressions. An infant learning truncated English would have no idea about this: They would just pick it up as they would standard English. ~ Noam Chomsky

As a graduate student, I wrote a long paper connecting the dots between mathematical models of learning and language development in children. It was published in a major journal. ~ Steven Pinker

All the things you put off, like learning to play the piano or leaning a different language? You're like, what's the point? I'm not really gonna do that, am I? ~ Leslie Mann

Grammar is the breathing power for the life of language ~ Munia Khan

I sat staring, staring, staring - half lost, learning a new language or rather the same language in a different dialect. So still were the big woods where I sat, sound might not yet have been born. ~ Emily Carr

Under the Assads, Kurds were forbidden from learning their own language at school, or even from speaking it in the military. The result is a generation of Syrian Kurds, many now in late middle age, who can't write their own language. ~ Luke Harding

It's like saying French shouldn't be taught because you don't understand it because it's new. Shakespeare is just like learning a new, exciting language. ~ Samuel Barnett

It would be really easy to write off the Dawn Wall as impossible. In terms of climbing technique, I'm learning a new language on this granite. ~ Kevin Jorgeson

I wanted to be understood. As a human-being, and as a writer. That meant getting to (truly) know myself- away from the opinions, beliefs, assumptions, criticism, and judgement of others. It meant re-learning language... to speak concisely. It meant learning the language of my heart and soul. ~ Cheri Bauer

The conquest of learning is achieved through the knowledge of languages. ~ Roger Bacon

I should be learning another language and working out more, but I'm just always saying, 'Ah, I could get hit by a bus tomorrow.' ~ Melissa McCarthy

Learning a language represents training in the delusions of that language. ~ Frank Herbert

Language is not a genetic gift, it is a social gift. Learning a new language is becoming a member of the club -the community of speakers of that language. ~ Frank Smith

I suspected learning a language would be both useful and enjoyable (I love memorising lists of things), and would get rid of the embarrassment of being monolingual at 21. I'd been obsessed with reading for as long as I could remember, the only thing I'd ever thought I might want to be was a writer, but I was much better at crafting sentences than at stringing plots together. ~ Deborah Smith

I'm an infant with Shakespeare; I'm kind of learning how to walk. I am trying to decipher the code, you know? I do my research. And I get a clear understanding of what the language is. It is a tremendous process I have to go through as I am sure all actors do, finding the gems hidden in his language. ~ Ruben Santiago-Hudson

Absolutely nothing is so important for a nation's culture as its language. ~ Wilhelm Von Humboldt

It's like learning a language; you can't speak a language fluently until you find out who you are in that language, and that has as much to do with your body as it does with vocabulary and grammar. ~ Fred Frith

In my career, I played for four different teams in a lot of different systems, and it's like learning another language. ~ Ron Jaworski

You've always had the power right there in your shoes, you just had to learn it for yourself. ~ William Blake

For animals, the confinement of the body is the confinement of the whole being, but a person can choose freedom even when he has no physical autonomy. In order to do so, he must know what choice is, and he must believe that he deserves it. By sharing stories, we keep choice alive in the imagination and in language. We give each other the strength to perform choice in the mind even when we cannot perform it with the body. ~ Sheena Iyengar

Repetition is the mute language of the abused child. ~ Judith Lewis Herman

On the face of it he seemed to be congratulating himself on dealing with patients more humanely than Yealland, but then why the mood of self-accusation? In the dream he stood in Yealland's place. The dream seemed to be saying, in dream language, don't flatter yourself. There is no distinction. ~ Pat Barker

Fuck your fucking mother!' Gesar howled, twisting the wheel round. In a moment of genuine terror only the Russian language could convey the true depths of his feelings. It made me feel proud of our great Russian culture! ~ Sergei Lukyanenko

THE LEVEL OF WORDS
God has said, "The images that come with human language do not correspond to me,
but those who love words must use them to come near."
Just remember, it's
like saying of the king, "He is not a weaver." Is that praise? Whatever such
a statement is, words are on THAT level of God-knowing. ~ Rumi

These are among the people I've tried to know twice, the second time in memory and language. Through them, myself. They are what I've become, in ways I don't understand but which I believe will accrue to a rounded truth, a second life for me as well as them.

Cracking jokes in the mandatory American manner of people self-concious about death. This is the humor of violent surprise.

How do you connect things? Learn their names.

It was a strange conversation, full of hedged remarks and obscure undercurrents, perfect in its way.

I was not a happy runner. I did it to stay interested in my body, to stay informed, and to set up clear lines of endeavor, a standard to meet, a limit to stay within. I was just enough of a puritan to think there must be some virtue in rigorous things, although I was careful not to overdo it.
I never wore the clothes. the shorts, tank top, high socks. Just running shoes and a lightweight shirt and jeans. I ran disguised as an ordinary person.

-When are you two going to have children?
-We're our own children.

In novels lately the only real love, the unconditional love I ever come across is what people feel for animals. Dolphins, bears, wolves, canaries.

I would avoid people, stop drinking.

There was a beggar with a Panasonic.

This is what love comes down to, things that happen and what we say about them.

But nothing mattered so much on thi ~ Don DeLillo

APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection. It is the language of the future for the programming techniques of the past: it creates a new generation of coding bums. ~ Edsger Dijkstra

Only philosophers embark on this perilous expedition to the outermost reaches of language and existence. Some of them fall off, but others cling on desperately and yell at the people nestling deep in the snug softness, stuffing themselves with delicious food and drink. 'Ladies and Gentlemen,' they yell, 'we are floating in space!' But none of the people down there care ~ Jostein Gaarder

Maybe you've gotten through something and when you did you thought, I am leaving that behind and will never return. And that's a great way of thinking ... for selfish jerks.
If we actually care about people other than ourselves, we can't leave our problems behind and never return. If we don't take the freedom we've experienced and try to bring it to others, we are not becoming people worth becoming. ~ Vince Antonucci

However well equipped our language, it can never be forearmed against all possible cases that may arise and call for description: fact is richer than diction. ~ J.L. Austin

She speaks the most beautiful Urdu. ~ Arundhati Roy

All I ask is this: Do something. Try something. Speaking out, showing up, writing a letter, a check, a strongly worded e-mail. Pick a cause – there are few unworthy ones. And nudge yourself past the brink of tacit support to action. Once a month, once a year, or just once...Even just learning enough about a subject so you can speak against an opponent eloquently makes you an unusual personage. Start with that. Any one of you would have cried out, would have intervened, had you been in that crowd in Bashiqa. Well thanks to digital technology, you're all in it now. ~ Joss Whedon

Whether one has natural talent or not, any learning period requires the willingness to suffer uncertainty and embarrassment. ~ Gail Sheehy

The natural sciences are sometimes said to have no concern with values, nor to seek morality and goodness, and therefore belong to an inferior order of things. Counter-claims are made that they are the only living and dynamic studies ... Both contentions are wrong. Language, Literature and Philosophy express, reflect and contemplate the world. But it is a world in which men will never be content to stay at rest, and so these disciplines cannot be cut off from the great searching into the nature of things without being deprived of life-blood. ~ Cyril Norman Hinshelwood

A passion for continual learning, a refined, discerning ear for the moral and ethical consequences of their actions, and an understanding of the purposes of work and human organisations ~ Warren G. Bennis

We often think that language mirrors the world in which we live, and I find that's not true. The language actually makes the world in which we live. Language is not - I mean, things don't have any mutable value by themselves; we ascribe them a value. ~ Chris Abani

A science is any discipline in which the fool of this generation can go beyond the point reached by the genius of the last generation. ~ Max Gluckman

Deleuze and Guattari have been totally misunderstood because the following has been wrenched from context: "Forming grammatically correct sentences is for the normal individual the prerequisite for any submission to social laws. No one is supposed to be ignorant of grammaticality; those who are belong in special institutions. The unity of language is fundamentally political." (112)
They are NOT advocating for this sort of prescriptive approach to language; rather, they are describing the social system around language--how language is a political tool. Why persist in quoting them as though they are promoting some sort of linguistic purity? ~ Gilles Deleuze

In an ideal world, the voices that teach us language teach us self-respect, self-confidence, and self-esteem. Those same voices also form in us humility and gratitude, and as those voices inform our inner voices, they also pass on wisdom. ~ Erwin Raphael McManus

As you begin to realize that every different type of music, everybody's individual music, has its own rhythm, life, language and heritage, you realize how life changes, and you learn how to be more open and adaptive to what is around us. ~ Yo-Yo Ma

Although she missed the singing by the children from the school opposite her apartment, she didn't teach her own pupils to sing 'We Shall Overcome' in any language, because she wasn't sure that Overcoming was anywhere on anyone's horizon. ~ Arundhati Roy

An ancient father says that a dog we know is better company than a man whose language we do not understand. ~ Michel De Montaigne

Music brought the war in Vietnam right into our bedrooms. Songs we heard from America made us interested in politics; they were history lessons in a palatable, exciting form. We demonstrated against the Vietnam and Korean wars, discussed sexual liberation, censorship and pornography and read books by Timothy Leary, Hubert Selby Jr (Last Exit to Brooklyn) and Marshall McLuhan because we'd heard all these people referred to in songs or interviews with musicians. [...] Music, politics, literature, art all crossed over and fed into each other. There were some great magazines around too [...] Even though we couldn't afford to travel, we felt connected to other countries because ideas and events from those places reached us through music and magazines. ~ Viv Albertine

A language so beautiful and lethal
My mouth bleeds when I speak it. - ~ Gwendolyn MacEwen

In this sort of predicament, always ask yourself: How did we learn the meaning of this word ("good", for instance)? From what sort of examples? In what language-games? Then it will be easier for you to see that the word must have a family of meanings. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

The poet marries the language, and out of this marriage the poem is born. ~ W. H. Auden

But how many young people truly comprehend the face of war until it's staring them down? You can't patrol unfriendly villages without embracing paranoia. You can't watch your battle buddies blown to bits without jonesing for revenge. You can't take a blow to the helmet without learning to duck. And you can't put people in your crosshairs, celebrate dropping them to the ground, without catching a little bloodlust. Paranoia. Revenge. Bloodlust. These things turn boys into men. But what kind of men? ~ Ellen Hopkins

My love translated sounds like a dead language. ~ Salma Deera

The writing style which is most natural for you is bound to echo the speech you heard when a child. English was the novelist Joseph Conrad's third language, and much of that seems piquant in his use of English was no doubt colored by his first language, which was Polish. And lucky indeed is the writer who has grown up in Ireland, for the English spoken there is so amusing and musical. I myself grew up in Indianapolis, where common speech sounds like a band saw cutting galvanized tin, and employs a vocabulary as unornamental as a monkey wrench.

In some of the more remote hollows of Appalachia, children still grow up hearing songs and locutions of Elizabethan times. Yes, and many Americans grow up hearing a language other than English, or an English dialect a majority of Americans cannot understand.

All these varieties of speech are beautiful, just as the varieties of butterflies are beautiful. No matter what your first language, you should treasure it all your life. If it happens not to be standard English, and if it shows itself when you write standard English, the result is usually delightful, like a very pretty girl with one eye that is green and one that is blue.

I myself find that I trust my own writing most, and others seem to trust it most, too, when I sound most like a person from Indianapolis, which is what I am. What alternatives do I have? The one most vehemently recommended by teachers has no doubt been pressed on you, as well: to w ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

The planet has a kind of intelligence, it can actually open a channel of communication with an individual human being. The message that nature sends is, transform your language through a synergy between electronic culture and the psychedelic imagination, a synergy between dance and idea, a synergy between understanding and intuition, and dissolve the boundaries that your culture has sanctioned between you, to become part of this Gaian supermind ~ Terence McKenna

Stone: Yes, we are everything, every experience we've ever had, and in some of us, a lot of it translates and makes patterns, poems. But, my God, we don't even began to touch upon it. There's an enormous amount, but we can touch such a little.

Interviewer: That's true, just a very small portion.

Stone: Very small. I think that's one of the things that our minds do; they sort out, somehow, often, and make patterns of significant things to us. And I think our minds do that for us in the dark, and then they offer them back in poems. I think your mind makes up your poem before you get it. You know, you receive the poem from your mind, you know you do. It takes a multitude of experiences, and all this language, and all this sound, and puts it together in these patterns that are significant to you and gives it back to you. ~ Ruth Stone

When we were children, letters were like fun toys. We played with them through our building blocks. We colored them in books. We danced and sang along with TV puppets while learning C was for "cookie." Soon, letters turned into words. Words turned into sentences. Sentences turned into thoughts. And along the way, we stopped playing with them and stopped marveling at A through Z. ~ Ji Lee

What bothers me the most about the way that people appropriate feminist language is that they are the same people who are - you know, anti-feminists - they're the same people who say that feminism is ruining the family, yet when it behooves them to, they'll say Sara Palin's a feminist - when all of a sudden it works in their favor. ~ Jessica Valenti

It is believed that as the cells are being knitted together to form a new human life, before there are language and words, memories are formed of the time in utero. Whether it was a good experience or a bad one, whether the mother was overjoyed or contemplating abortion, the baby picks up those feelings. They remain with us inside our bodies in the form of physical memory. It is becoming common knowledge that babies in the womb respond to music, light and sound, so it makes sense that a baby would also respond to its mother's stresses and joys. ~ Zara Phillips

More learning can occur when there are many obstacles then when thear are few or none. A life with difficult relationships, filled with obstacles and losses, presents the most opportunity for the soul's growth. You may have chosen the more difficult life so that you could accelerate your physical progress ~ Brian L. Weiss

Because Spanish is a feeling-based language that comes first from the heart, just as English is a thinking-based language that comes first from the head. ~ Victor Villasenor