James Fenton Quotes

I want to play in Europe and learn another language. Spain and Italy are options.

When I was living in the Dominican Republic, the local kids became a part of my family.

Moving to France is not the hard part. Living here is more difficult. Of course there are many benefits but it's not always easy especially if you don't speak the language.

I was fortunate enough to have a rambling youth.

I had a hard time convincing students that they were going to North Africa to understand the North Africans, not to understand themselves.

After college, I went to England and studied for a couple years.

The best way to travel abroad is to live with the locals.

When I was a senior in high school, I went to Ireland to study Irish Gaelic. And after one semester at Trinity College, I went way out to the west coast of Ireland and rented a little house by myself.

I lived in England to learn English. When I went to England for the first time, it was like being on the Moon. I had no friends, I couldn't speak the language. I was very isolated.

Going through different places, I stopped through Dubai and stayed there overnight. There I had an ultra-culture shock.

It's like a dream to come to Spain and stay for a couple of years and get somebody to teach me Spanish music.

It is an agreeable and yet a painful sense of novelty to stand for the first time in the midst of a people whose language and manners are different from one's own.

When we were 15, my girlfriend Ruth Kaplan and I applied to the Universidad Ibero-Americana in Mexico City. We were accepted into a program that placed us with a lovely Mexican family. We lived with them for six weeks while studying Spanish poetry and Mexican anthropology.

I came to New York to study ballet and English.

I wanted to learn a few foreign languages, and therefore I had to go abroad.

I spent my last year of high school in Latin America, and there's a edge of salsa under all of my rhythms.

I have a one-question language test that people who have lived abroad do better on than those who studied in a classroom. Try my test yourself: In a foreign language you've studied, how do you say 'doorknob'?

My initial plan was to spend a year in France, go to some kind of school and learn a bit of French. I went a year in an American college in the outskirts of Strasbourg, but got a glimpse of a real art school, L'Ecole des Arts Decoratifs, and enrolled the following year.

Columbia University, where I went to study in 1993, insisted its undergraduates learn a foreign language, so I discovered French.

If you can speak English, and you can get a place on a proper course at a proper university, you can come to study in Britain.

Basketball, in America, is like a culture. It is like a foreigner learning a new language. It is difficult to learn foreign languages and it will also be difficult for me to learn the culture for basketball here.

When I was in high school, I was lucky enough to be an exchange student to a small town in Argentina called Goya.

When I last went to Italy, over two years ago, I had a lot more trouble understanding the language than I used to when I lived there for a year. I used to speak very little but I could understand very well.

I moved to Paris for two years, then to London, then New York in 2002. In that time, I also lived in Japan, Italy, Germany - I've been a bit of a gypsy.

I loved France, although I initially thought they were stubborn for always speaking French.