Quotes & Sayings About Second Languages

We are not told, or not told early enough so that it sinks in, that mathematics is a language, and that we can learn it like any other, including our own. We have to learn our own language twice, first when we learn to speak it, second when we learn to read it. Fortunately, mathematics has to be learned only once, since it is almost wholly a written language. — Mortimer J. Adler

All languages that derive from Latin form the word "compassion" by combining the prefix meaning "with" (com-) and the root meaning "suffering" (Late Latin, passio). In other languages, Czech, Polish, German, and Swedish, for instance - this word is translated by a noun formed of an equivalent prefix combined with the word that means "feeling".
In languages that derive from Latin, "compassion" means: we cannot look on coolly as others suffer; or, we sympathize with those who suffer. Another word with approximately the same meaning, "pity", connotes a certain condescension towards the sufferer. "To take pity on a woman" means that we are better off than she, that we stoop to her level, lower ourselves.
That is why the word "compassion" generally inspires suspicion; it designates what is considered an inferior, second-rate sentiment that has little to do with love. To love someone out of compassion means not really to love. — Milan Kundera

Malcolm Bradbury made the point, and I don't know whether it's a valid one or not, that the real English at the moment is not the English spoken in England or in America or even in Canada or Australia or New Zealand. The real English is the English which is a second language, so that it's rather like Latin in the days of the Roman Empire when people had their own languages, but had Latin in order to communicate. — William Golding

Learn Languages the Right Way. Language acquisition games and abstract communicative method are bullshit. The second-best way to learn a foreign language is alone in a room doing skull-numbing rote memorization of vocabulary, grammar, key phrases, and colloquialisms. The best way is in bed. — Chuck Thompson

Translation is a form of passive aggression. In doing it, a writer chooses to forgo original authorship so as to play havoc with a foreign original in a process of imitation, zigzagging between the foreign and receiving languages but in the last analysis cancelling the first in favor of the second. — Lawrence Venuti

No matter what town you are in, there is some social order and a different yardstick to chart. In New York, people create things like schools and speaking languages and second homes. — Jill Kargman

What governs what we choose to notice? The first (which we shall have to qualify later) is whatever seems advantageous or disadvantageous for our survival, our social status, and the security of our egos. The second, again working simultaneously with the first, is the pattern and the logic of all the notation symbols which we have learned from others, from our society and our culture. It is hard indeed to notice anything for which the languages available to us (whether verbal, mathematical, or musical) have no description. This is why we borrow words from foreign languages. — Alan W. Watts

Fictions are useful so long as they are taken as fictions. They are then
simply ways of "figuring" the world which we agree to follow so that
we can act in cooperation, as we agree about inches and hours, numbers
and words, mathematical systems and languages. If we have no
agreement about measures of time and space, I would have no way of
making a date with you at the corner of Forty-second Street and Fifth
Avenue at 3 P.M. on Sunday, April 4. — Alan W. Watts

Her English was sweet, an effort for her, anachronistic and unpractised. — Ruth Ahmed

Sign language is my first language. English and Spanish are my second languages. I learned Spanish from my grandparents, sign language from my parents, and English from television. — Jack Jason

Africa is a huge continent; it would take several lifetimes of thousands of researchers testing in hundreds of languages to collect a valid sample of anything, especially IQ. Most Africans do their schooling in a second language, not their mother tongue. How many people would accept to be tested for their IQ level not in their primary language? — T.K. Naliaka

Choose one thing and become a master of it. Choose a second thing and become a master of that. When you become a master of two worlds (say, engineering and business), you can bring them together in a way that will a) introduce hot ideas to each other, so they can have idea sex and make idea babies that no one has seen before and b) create a competitive advantage because you can move between worlds, speak both languages, connect the tribes, mash the elements to spark fresh creative insight until you wake up with the epiphany that changes your life. — Justine Musk

The sun is at the horizon now, and the sky streaks with reds and golds. The whole world seems to be wearing a halo, and for a second I let myself savor it.
I let myself believe.
Alexei's arm is warm around my shoulder and a cool breeze blows in off the sea. Between us, we speak seven different languages, but not a one of us says a word.
We sit in silence as the sun sets, marking the end of this day.
Marking the beginning of everything else. — Ally Carter

I was in the second year of my PhD when I first had the idea - I'd recently started working as a translator, which meant firstly that I was hearing about amazing-sounding books from other translators, and also that I was getting enough of an insider's view of the publishing industry to be aware of all the implicit biases that made it so difficult for these books to ever get published, especially if they weren't from European languages (harder to discover, editors can't read the original, lack of funding programmes, authors who don't speak English). — Deborah Smith

If you listen to the urban speech patterns in India you'll find it's quite characteristic that a sentence will begin in one language, go through a second language and end in a third. It's the very playful, very natural result of juggling languages. You are always reaching for the most appropriate phrase. — Salman Rushdie

Gabriel slowly began rubbing his eyes, for in addition to suffering from one of the worst hangover headaches of his life, he was slightly enjoying the sight of Miss Mitchell in his T-shirt and boxer shorts, passionately angry and shouting at him in a multiplicity of Western European languages. It was the second most erotic thing he had ever witnessed. And it was entirely beside the point. — Sylvain Reynard

Language development, for instance, has a critical period that begins in infancy and ends between eight years and puberty. After this critical period closes, a person's ability to learn a second language without an accent is limited. In fact, second languages learned after the critical period are not processed in the same part of the brain as is the native tongue. — Norman Doidge

The record of his life and teaching, the Gospels, have impacted the world so much that they have been translated into 2,527 languages. The second-most-translated book, Don Quixote, has been translated into about 60 languages. The — John Ortberg

C19: People make fun of our speaking a minority language. How should I react? It is often people who can't speak a second language who tend to poke fun at those who can speak two or three languages. — Colin Baker

People fluent in two languages can lose either one after trauma, since first and second languages* draw on distinct neural circuits. Language deficits can even interfere with math. We seem to have a natural "number circuit" in the parietal lobe that handles comparisons and magnitudes - the basis of most arithmetic. But we learn some things (like the times tables) linguistically, by rote memorization. So if language goes kaput, so too will those linguistically based skills. More strikingly, some people who struggle to string even three words together can sing just fine. — Sam Kean