Quotes & Sayings About Language Learning

A good programming language is a conceptual universe for thinking about programming. — Alan Perlis

Rose turned to me. "Did she just speak to him in Spanish?" "Yeah," I said. "She only speaks to him in Spanish, actually. It was in some parenting book she read about kids learning a second language. — Richelle Mead

I feel like really thinking about art and really appreciating it and learning the language of it just makes you more of a connoisseur. I believe that. — David Rees

some linguists have also concluded that, while the innatist perspective provides a plausible explanation for first language acquisition, something else is required for second language acquisition, since it so often falls short of full success. From the cognitive psychology perspective, however, first and second language acquisition are seen as drawing on the same processes of perception, memory, categorization, and generalization. The difference lies in the circumstances of learning as well as in what the learners already know about language and how that prior knowledge shapes their perception of the new language. — Patsy M. Lightbown

She decided that day to study Russian, the language of violence, terror, and absurdity. She knew she would never be bored. — Natalie Standiford

Also, they don't understand - writing is language. The use of language. The language to create image, the language to create drama. It requires a skill of learning how to use language. — John Milius

Older acquirers progress more quickly in early stages because they obtain more comprehensible input, while younger acquirers do better in the long run because of their lower affective filters. — Stephen D. Krashen

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

Only loyal love knows the sacred path to a faithful heart — Munia Khan

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

If the goal you've set for yourself has a 100 percent chance of success, then frankly you aren't aiming high enough. — Benny Lewis

Jesus is why women have traveled continents, spent decades learning a strange language so they could translate the Gospel, planting churches, caring for the sick, educating the illiterate, and marching for the oppressed. — John Ortberg

Whoever said dogs can't speak was never interested in learning another language. — Mark Winik

Learning the rules that govern intelligible speech is an inculcation into normalized language, where the price of not conforming is the loss of intelligibility itself. — Judith Butler

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

Since the days of Peter the Great, Russia had looked to the West for her civilization, even to the extend of adopting French as a second language - or as a first for people of station and learning. The United States, recently cut loose politically from England, still drew heavily on the Old World for her art, literature, science and philosophy. Intellectuals from both nations flocked to Europe in search of eduction and aesthetic stimulation, and many became so enthralled with European civilization that they failed to return. In Russia as well as in the United States many an indignant patriot would rant about the need for serving European apron strings. — Perry D. Westbrook

While learning the language in France a young man's morals, health and fortune are more irresistibly endangered than in any country of the universe. — Thomas Jefferson

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

Our goal as a parent is to give life to our children's learning
to instruct, to teach, to help them develop self-discipline
an ordering of the self from the inside, not imposition from the outside. Any technique that does not give life to a child's learning and leave a child's dignity intact cannot be called discipline
it is punishment, no matter what language it is clothed in. — Barbara Coloroso

Double your life experience by learning a second language.
-Taru — Taru Nieminen

The journey of learning the secret language of dreams is fascinating and well worth the effort. — Pamela Cummins

I don't like reading music. It's like learning a language. You can't read music proficiently overnight. It takes time, it's boring work. — William Eggleston

Learning to "find my place in the world" translates in the practical language of life as "finding my little slot in the big State machine. — Anna Sofia Botkin

I wouldn't call myself a dancer. I would never even dance in a club - I can't move my feet! I'm terribly shy about moving. I feel comfortable in my body, but dancing is like learning another language. — Matthew James Thomas

Challenging power structures from the inside, working the cracks within the system, however, requires learning to speak multiple languages of power convincingly. — Patricia Hill Collins

On the hill behind her crows flew one by one into the bare trees, arranging their dark blots in the scrim of branches and adding their warnings to the drear sounds of this day. Gone, gone, they rasped. Here was a dead world learning to speak in dissonant, unbearable sounds. — Barbara Kingsolver

Something of the previous state, however, survives every change. This is called in the language of cybernetics (which took it form the language of machines) feedback, the advantages of learning from experience and of having developed reflexes. — Guy Davenport

I love the quietness of the library, the gateway to knowledge, to the French language and medieval history and hydraulic engineering and fairy tales, learning in a very primitive form: books, something that's quickly giving way to modern technology. — Mary Kubica

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

Programming languages, like pizzas, come in only too sizes; too big and too small. — Richard E. Pattis

Humanists were people who wanted to return to ideas found in old Greek and Latin writing of Greece and Rome, written many centuries earlier. Christian Humanists also wanted to get back to these ideas, but they were mainly concerned with learning about the early Christian Church, before it had become involved with money-making and superstition. They wanted to read the books of the early Church, especially the gospels of Christ, in the original language of Greek, so that they would know exactly what the writings meant. The leader of the Christian Humanists was Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536), who attacked superstitions in the Catholic Church in his writing. — Michael A. Mullett

My mom had this romantic notion of her children playing classical music. The idea is you learn it when you're still learning language. It's using the same part of the brain. — Andrew Bird

The luster of an experience can actually go up with time. So, learning to play a new instrument, learning a new language - those sorts of things will pay dividends for years or decades to come. — Dan Buettner

For those learning English as a second language, there is little to do but roll the eyes, tear at the hair, and grimly memorize each one. — Anne Stilman

But lots of emerging racial tensions in California have nothing to do with whites: Filipinos and Samoans are fighting it out in San Francisco high schools. Merced is becoming majority Mexican and Cambodian. They may be fighting in gangs right now, but I bet they are also learning each other's language. — Richard Rodriguez

Learning is available at the library for free; under a tree with a dog-eared paperback; at a job with a boss who gives you responsibility and mentorship; while traveling; while leading a cause, movement, or charity; while writing a novel or composing a poem or crafting a song; while interning, apprenticing, or volunteering; while playing a sport or immersing yourself in a language; while starting a business; and now, while watching a TED talk or taking a Khan Academy class ... — Michael Ellsberg

We think only through the medium of words. Languages are true analytical methods. Algebra, which is adapted to its purpose in every species of expression, in the most simple, most exact, and best manner possible, is at the same time a language and an analytical method. The art of reasoning is nothing more than a language well arranged. — Antoine Lavoisier

This book might also be seen as "a Christian primer." A primer teaches us how to read. Reading is not just about learning to recognize and pronounce words, but also about how to hear and understand them. This book's purpose is to help us to read, hear, and inwardly digest Christian language without preconceived understandings getting in the way. — Marcus J. Borg

Books were her refuge. Having set herself to learn the Russian language, she read every Russian book she could find. But French was the language she preferred, and she read French books indiscriminately, picking up whatever her ladies-in-waiting happened to be reading. She always kept a book in her room and carried another in her pocket. — Robert K. Massie

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

Imagine, what could you really accomplish if your speech was filled with more statements that began with "I can" than with "I can't"? How far could your dreams soar if you said, "Why not me?" instead of "Why me?" more often? And just like when you are learning a new language, you're still going to slip up and say, "I could have done . . ." instead of "I will do . . ." Surround yourself with native successful speakers, and before you know it, you'll begin to speak the life of your dreams into existence. — Steve Harvey

Learning grammar can be viewed as a game that a little boy plays with his father. Daddy talks, the boy listens - perhaps disobeys - and Daddy talks some more. All the while the boy is trying to figure out the grammar that can generate the sentences in Daddy's speech. The boy might occasionally talk back, but there is no guarantee that Daddy will pay any attention. Not that he is a bad father: recall from Chapter 5 that in some cultures, adults do not interact with children until they are socially and linguistically adept. To fully understand the game of language learning, then, Daddy can be assumed only as a rather passive participant. The goal of the game is to learn Daddy's grammar within some finite amount of time: nobody learns forever. — Charles Yang

A lovely evening of new idioms and fresh mozzarella. — Elizabeth Gilbert

Learning the love language of acts of service will require some of us to reexamine our stereotypes of the roles of husbands and wives. — Gary Chapman

In the absence of either a widely accepted theory of language learning or a solid empirical base for classroom practice, teachers and learners have always been, and will always be, vulnerable to drastic pendulum swings of fashion, the coming and going of various unconventional and unlamented "Wonder Methods" being an obvious recent example. The sad truth is that after at least 2,000 years, most language teaching takes place on a wing and a prayer - sometimes successfully, but often a relative failure. — Michael H. Long

That be common for I, also, but be more strong, you. Much work and someday, you talk pretty. People start love you soon. Maybe tomorrow, okay. — David Sedaris

Beneath the uniformity that unites us in communication there is a chaotic personal diversity of connections, and, for each of us, the connections continue to evolve. No two of us learn our language alike, nor, in a sense, does any finish learning it while he lives. — Willard Van Orman Quine

Learning preserves the errors of the past, as well as its wisdom. For this reason, dictionaries are public dangers, although they are necessities. — Alfred North Whitehead

My hours of leisure I spent in reading the best authors, ancient and modern, being always provided with a good number of books; and when I was ashore, in observing the manners and dispositions of the people, as well as learning their language; wherein I had a great facility, by the strength of my memory. — Jonathan Swift

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

I'm trying to tell
MiSSSisss WaSShington
about our ceremony for Father.
But it takes time to
match every noun and verb,
sort all the tenses,
remember all the articles,
set the tone for every s.
MiSSSisss WaSShington says
if every learner waits
to speak perfectly,
no one would learn
a new language.
Being stubborn
won't make you fluent.
Practicing will!
The more mistakes you make,
the more you'll learn not to.
They laugh. — Thanhha Lai

Education is neither writing on a blank slate nor allowing the child's nobility to come into flower. Rather, education is a technology that tries to make up for what the human mind is innately bad at. Children don't have to go to school to learn to walk, talk, recognize objects, or remember the personalities of their friends, even though these tasks are much harder than reading, adding, or remembering dates in history. They do have to go to school to learn written language, arithmetic, and science, because those bodies of knowledge and skill were invented too recently for any species-wide knack for them to have evolved. — Steven Pinker

One difference is that individuals living in multilingual communities seem to settle on an optimal cognitive load. The hyperpolyglot possesses a similar patchwork of linguistic proficiencies. Yet he or she exceeds this optimum with a conspicuous consumption of brain power (...) For multilinguals, learning languages is an act of joining society. There's no motive, no separable 'will to plasticity' that's distinct from what it means to be a part of that society. Being a hyperpolyglot means exactly the opposite. The hyperpolyglot's pursuit of many languages may be a bridge to the rest of the world, but it walls him off from his immediate language community. — Michael Erard

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

After learning the language and culture of the Chinese people, these Jesuits began to establish contacts with the young intellectuals of the country. — Hu Shih

We have also obtained a glimpse of another crucial idea about languages and program design. This is the approach of statified design, the notion that a complex system should be structured as a sequence of levels that are described using a sequence of languages. Each level is constructed by combining parts that are regarded as primitive at that level, and the parts constructed at each level are used as primitives at the next level. The language used at each level of a stratified design has primitives, means of combination, and means of abstraction appropriate to that level of detail. — Hal Abelson

Learning astrology is like learning any foreign language. You already have the ideas, concepts, and experiences of your life within you; you are just learning a new language for what you are already experiencing. — Barbara Goldsmith

I am not learning definitions as established in even the latest dictionaries. I am not a dictionary-maker. I am a person a dictionary-maker has to contend with. I am a living evidence in the development of language. — William Stafford

Learning through the arts reinforces critical academic skills in reading, language arts and math and provides students with the skills to creatively solve problems. — Michelle Obama

Language is what we use to tell stories, transmit knowledge, and build social bonds. It comforts, tickles, excites, and destroys. Every society has language, and somehow we all learn a language in the first few years of our lives, a process that has been repeated for as long as humans have been around. Unlike swimming, using Microsoft Windows, or making the perfect lemon souffle - which some of us never manage to do - learning a language is a task we can all take for granted. — Charles Yang

That which is now called learning, was not learning originally. Learning does not consist, as the schools now make it consist, in the knowledge of languages, but in the knowledge of things to which language gives names. — Thomas Paine

This was always my trouble when I was learning to speak your language. Every word can defend itself. Just when you go to grab it, it can split into two separate meanings so the understanding closes on empty air. I admire you people. You are like sorcerers and you have made your language as safe as your money. — Chris Cleave

Latin is a dead tongue
And Romans made songs!
Then no one disagree:
It delighted them in theory
Now it's "the Latin" in me. — Ana Claudia Antunes

We often treat children as if they're not very competent to do anything on their own. So we make them stop learning in a natural way - by exploring. Logo [the computer programming language ] allows them to find their way around the computer, as they would find their way around the house, uncontaminated by the bureaucracies of schools. — Seymour Papert

As evolutionary time is measured, we have only just turned up and have hardly had time to catch breath, still marveling at our thumbs, still learning to use the brand-new gift of language. Being so young, we can be excused all sorts of folly and can permit ourselves the hope that someday, as a species, we will begin to grow up. — Lewis Thomas

A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing. — Alan Perlis

Language is best taught when it is being used to transmit messages, not when it is explicitly taught for conscious learning. — Stephen D. Krashen

The real technology -behind all our other technologies- is language. It actually creates the world our consciousness lives in. — Andrei Codrescu

We must keep in mind that only a part of memory can be translated into the language-based packets of information people use to tell their life stories to others. Learning to be open to many layers of communication is a fundamental part of getting to know another person's life. — Daniel J. Siegel

When you are a kid you have your own language, and unlike French or Spanish or whatever you start learning in fourth grade, this one you are born with, and eventually lose ... Kids think with their brains cracked wide open; becoming an adult ... is only a slow sewing it shut. — Jodi Picoult

Although all new talkers say names, use similar sounds, and prefer nouns more
than other parts of speech, the ratio of nouns to verbs and adjectives varies
from place to place (Waxman et al., 2013). For example, by 18 months, Englishspeaking infants speak far more nouns than verbs compared to Chinese or Korean
infants. Why?
One explanation goes back to the language itself. The Chinese and Korean
languages are "verb-friendly" in that verbs are placed at the beginning or end of
sentences. That facilitates learning. By contrast, English verbs occur anywhere in
a sentence, and their forms change in illogical ways (e.g., go, gone, will go, went).
This irregularity may make English verbs harder to learn, although the fact that
English verbs often have distinctive suffixes (-ing, -ed) and helper words (was, did,
had) may make it easier (Waxman et al., 2013). — Kathleen Stassen Berger

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

When I went to Moscow, I felt I was relearning Swan Lake - which was written for the Bolshoi - and being immersed in a tradition and history I had never experienced. It took a while to adjust to living there and learning the language, but now I have lots of friends. I get the best of two completely different worlds. — David Hallberg

Society. Sins such as adultery, bribery, and betrayal are more like treason than like crime; they damage the social order. Social harmony can be rewoven only by slowly recommitting to relationships and rebuilding trust. The sins of arrogance and pride arise from a perverse desire for status and superiority. The only remedy for them is to humble oneself before others. In other words, people in earlier times inherited a vast moral vocabulary and set of moral tools, developed over centuries and handed down from generation to generation. This was a practical inheritance, like learning how to speak a certain language, which people could use to engage their own moral struggles. — David Brooks

The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve. We should be grateful for it and hope that it will remain valid in future research and that it will extend, for better or for worse, to our pleasure, even though perhaps also to our bafflement, to wide branches of learning. — Eugene Paul Wigner

Possible explanations for talented language learning fall into two general areas. One view says: What matters is a person's sense of mission and dedication to language learning. You don't need to describe high performers as biologically exceptional, because what they do is a product of practice. Anyone can become a foreign-language expert - even an adult. (...) The other view says: Something neurological is going on. We may not know exactly what the mechanisms are, but we can't explain exceptional outcomes fully through training or motivation. — Michael Erard

Mathematics is the language with which God has written the universe. — Galileo Galilei

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. — Mark Lippert

Every one has experienced how learning an appropriate name for what was dim and vague cleared up and crystallized the whole matter. Some meaning seems distinct almost within reach, but is elusive; it refuses to condense into definite form; the attaching of a word somehow (just how, it is almost impossible to say) puts limits around the meaning, draws it out from the void, makes it stand out as an entity on its own account. — John Dewey

Paulo Coelho once said that following your dream is like learning a foreign language; you will make mistakes but you will get there in the end. — Paulo Coelho

He proposed an imitation game. There would be a man (A), a woman (B) and an interrogator (C) in a separate room, reading the written answers from the others, trying to work out which was the woman. B would be trying to hinder the process. Now, said Turing, imagine that A was replaced by a computer. Could the interrogator tell whether they were talking to a machine or not after five minutes of questioning? He gave snatches of written conversation to show how difficult the Turing Test would be: Q: Please write me a sonnet on the subject of the Forth Bridge. A: Count me out on this one. I never could write poetry. To imitate that a computer would need deep knowledge of social mores and the use of language. To pass the Turing Test the computer would have to do more than imitate. It would have to be a learning entity. — David Boyle

Learning a foreign language, and the culture that goes with it, is one of the most useful things we can do to broaden the empathy and imaginative sympathy and cultural outlook of children. — Michael Gove

I've become obsessed with learning other languages in movies, because I was like, since I was like, but I learned how to box so why don't I just learn another language for a movie? — Jake Gyllenhaal

Without language, thought is a vague, uncharted nebula. — Ferdinand De Saussure

For usage-based theorists, acquisition of language, while impressive, is not the only remarkable feat accomplished by the child. They compare it to other cognitive and perceptual learning, including learning to 'see'. That is, the visual abilities that we take for granted, for example, focusing on and interpreting objects in our visual field, are actually learned through experience. — Patsy M. Lightbown

[Armenian] is a rich language, however, and would amply repay any one the trouble of learning it. — Lord Byron

Language is still separating us even though technology is bringing us closer together. — Suzy Kassem

With languages, you can move from one social situation to another. With languages, you are at home anywhere. — Edmund De Waal

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

It is no secret that the fruits of language study are in no sort of relation to the labour spent on teaching and learning them. — Edward Sapir

This is the difficulty with learning a language: not always knowing if words contain more than they say. — Joan Barfoot

There's no coincidence here; we learn better when we're having fun, and in looking for the fastest ways to learn, I naturally ended up with the most enjoyable methods. My favorite thing about language learning is this: — Anonymous

Some studies of successful language learners have suggested that they're more "open to new experiences" than the rest of us. Temptingly, psychologist Alexander Guiora proposed that we have a self that's bound up in our native language, a "language ego", which needs to be loose and more permeable to learn a new language. Those with more fluid ego boundaries, like children and people who have drunk some alcohol, are more willing to sound not like themselves, which means they have better accents in the new language. — Michael Erard

It needs more than ever to be stressed that the best and truest educators are parents under God. The greatest school is the family. In learning, no act of teaching in any school or university compares to the routine task of mothers in teaching a babe who speaks no language the mother tongue in so short a time. No other task in education is equal to this. The moral training of the children, the discipline of good habits, is an inheritance from the parents to the children which surpasses all other. The family is the first and basic school of man. — Rousas John Rushdoony

NVC is language, thoughts, communication skills and means of influence that serve my desire to do three things: 1) to liberate myself from cultural learning that is in conflict with how I want to live my life. 2) to empower myself to connect with myself and others in a way that makes compassionate giving natural. 3) to empower myself to create structures that support compassionate giving. — Marshall B. Rosenberg

Orm always afterwards used to say that, after good luck, strength, and skill at arms, nothing was so useful to a man who found himself among foreigners as the ability to learn a language. — Frans G. Bengtsson

Independent and stubborn natures, such as are particularly common among men of learning, do not readily bow to another's will and for the most part only accept his leadership grudgingly. But when Lorentz is in the presidential chair, an atmosphere of happy cooperation is invariably created, however much those present may differ in their aims and habits of thought. The secret of this success lies not only in his swift comprehension of people and things and his marvelous command of language, but above all in this, that one feels that his whole heart is in the business at hand, and that when he is at work, he has room for nothing else in his mind. Nothing disarms the recalcitrant so much as this. — Albert Einstein

Evidently there is difficulty, real difficulty, in learning a foreign language at all, as if it sprinkled all the sweet flavor of the Greek mythical stories with a foul taste. — Augustine Of Hippo

The discipline of programming is most like sorcery. Both use precise language to instruct inanimate objects to do our bidding. Small mistakes in programs or spells can lead to completely unforseen behavior: e.g., see the story, "The Sorcerer's Apprentice". Neither study is easy: " ... her [Galinda's] early appetite for sorcery had waned once she'd heard what a grind it was to learn spells and, worse, to understand them." from the book "Wicked" by G. Maguire. — Richard E. Pattis