The only way to learn a language properly, in fact, is to marry a man of that nationality. You get what they call in Europe a ‘sleeping dictionary.’ Of course, I have only been married five times, and I speak seven languages. I’m still trying to remember where I picked up the other two.
Because journalists of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty – the former broadcast into Eastern Europe, the latter into the Soviet Union – accurately depicted daily life in communist Europe, in the local languages, using native journalists, millions of people tuned in to them.
I’ve been working in three-four languages. I’m happy to do it.
I like to read, especially nonfiction. I love learning, so I study languages, cook, learn basic HTML, and enjoy other activities that stimulate communication and the dark recesses of my musician’s brain.
My mom was an executive at AT&T, a global account lady. I have no idea what she did. I just know she was never home and speaks several languages.
I realized very early in life what my abilities and limitations were, and foreign languages was definitely one of my limitations. With strenuous effort, I just barely passed my French class at Harvard so I could graduate.
Bollywood is just one of the industries I am working in. I have sung in other languages and for ad jingles too.
I start by using Chinese and many of the sounds of other languages are similar.
One effect that the Nobel Prize seems to have had is that more Arabic literary works have been translated into other languages.
I chose a pseudonym, Chris Marker, pronounceable in most languages, because I was very intent on traveling.
There is the fear, common to all English-only speakers, that the chief purpose of foreign languages is to make fun of us. Otherwise, you know, why not just come out and say it?
I grew up doing a lot of traveling. My mom left home when she was 15 and traveled to 48 different countries and speaks six different languages. So I grew up with my eyes open. She raised me so that if my heart says something is wrong, I have to go help. What’s right is right and what’s wrong is wrong.
I have been an actor now for 40 years having worked in over 10 countries and three languages.
There are all these languages that keep people in place that conform us to a set of terms. It’s why I think the whole idea of identity as something that is something of a straitjacket. That most of us like to think of as natural and innate. That we just find and go, ‘Yeah, that’s who I am.’
Science and technology multiply around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use those languages, or we remain mute.
I think it is an inborn talent – just luck. Some people can learn languages; some can throw a ball. Most people have something. My talent is drawing and painting.
Language is not a barrier, specially Hindi. It is the only language I read, write and speak in and so it is far easier than South Indian languages.
I feel that working now is the way for me to learn things, whether it’s languages or another activity.
Acting in different languages doesn’t stop you from growing; on the contrary, for an artiste, it helps a lot.
I have the luxury of balancing and juggling films in different languages.
I consider myself blessed that I am multi-lingual and now-a-days we all speak at least two-three languages.
‘Starcraft’ was never designed to support multi-byte languages. In order to support more complicated languages like Korean or Chinese, you need two bytes of storage and ‘Starcraft’ only had one byte.
There are two languages: one as things seem to us and the other of knowledge.
I grew up speaking Spanish. The woman who helped raise me was only Spanish-speaking, so it was one of my primary languages as a kid. And I lived in Spain for a while.
Growing up biracial and speaking four languages – French, Chinese, Portuguese, and English – gave me a different lens. I was always very acutely aware of coming from a different perspective. I think that definitely contributed to what I chose to do with my life.
The printed word will be around long after many of our digital creations are gone, either because books don’t require monthly hosting, and blogs and websites do… or because the languages and platforms for which a particular digital creation was published will become obsolete.
History shows, in my opinion, that no nation can survive the tension, conflict and antagonism of two competing languages and cultures. It is a blessing for an individual to be bilingual; it is a curse for a society to be bilingual.
The main languages out of which web applications are built – whether it’s Perl or Python or PHP or any of the other languages – those are all open source languages. So the infrastructure of the web is open source… the web as we know it is completely dependent on open source.
I work with refugee families in Hackney in my local area in east London. Sport brings them together. A lot of the children come from different countries and speak different languages. It’s difficult to find things they can all connect and interact with that are non-verbal. Sport is it.
I am comfortable with all four South Indian languages.
I suppose my ideal brain food is learning languages.
The way that I approached numbers, think about them, the same as for language as well-acquiring vocabulary, understanding the grammar, the structures of languages, the rhythm, the music and so-on – these things obviously evolved.
I forced myself to watch Spanish TV and listen to Spanish radio all the time. I think I’m lucky because, for whatever reason, people from the Balkans seem to have a talent for learning languages.
I’m certainly curious about people. As a kid, I moved around a lot. I was raised in a lot of different places, and thanks to working in the movies, I’ve gotten to keep traveling. I’ve always been interested in other cultures and languages.
What I’m interested in doing in a story is bringing certain different languages, people, events together and then letting the reader make what he wants of it.
I have a high regard for Native languages and the pivotal role they have played in our nation’s history.
German has always felt the language that I come back to. It’s given a very hard time by most people for being ugly and guttural. In fact, it’s one of the most melodic, lyrical languages around. And German literature is amazing. It’s just a treasury for me.
I do not read the ancient languages, but I am beginning to study Greek.
The places I come from have such rich languages, such a variety of expression. In Sierra Leone we have about fifteen languages and three dialects. I grew up speaking about seven of them.
One of the best known, and one of the least intelligible, facts of literary history is the lateness, in Western European Literature at any rate, of prose fiction, and the comparative absence, in the two great classical languages, of what we call by that name.
The Soviet Union had only one party. You couldn’t express yourself freely; you couldn’t admit belief in God. And yet this terrible regime understood that human beings have to express themselves, through music, even at a bad level. All kids studied music automatically, just as they did maths or languages or sport.
If a writer doesn’t do anything but give a new word to his language and, from there, maybe to other languages, I think that writer redefines the world.
Most people don’t know what goes on in the intelligence services. Certainly I had very little idea what went on in GCHQ. For me it was a job, a chance to use my languages.
Rejection is part of the process, so you can’t let it crush you. My first three novels never made it into publication, but my fourth, ‘Sheltering Rain,’ was translated into 11 languages.
I like to take risks and do weird things and stuff that’s not normal compared to other Hollywood movies. Not stuff that’s totally avant garde and daring, but doing stuff that’s in other languages and not using stars and using real people – things that they generally don’t do in mainstream films.
If you have a billion people running a phone in every corner of their lives, and all these third-party apps and all these countries and all these languages, there are going to be issues.
I have done films in nine languages and am known in as many states.
Many people tend to look at programming styles and languages like religions: if you belong to one, you cannot belong to others. But this analogy is another fallacy.
I also had this mistaken dream, fantasy really – perhaps because I’m good at languages – of being able in both Italy and France to become someone else through my fluency in the language.
Well, my first languages are German and Spanish because I was brought up by a Spanish mother and a German father, so I always spoke both languages at home. I’m very thankful that I was brought up in a bilingual house.
I like to write in coffee shops in countries in which languages I do not speak are spoken. That way, you’re surrounded by the buzz of humanity, but you aren’t distracted by people’s conversations.
We south Indians are clannish and comfortable about our languages.
I like to think of religion as languages, our religion is very cultural, it has a lot to do with where we are born on this planet, it can really impact our religious beliefs.
