Samantha Power Quotes

It's a complicated process being so bilingual. Sometimes it's a mere word or sentence that comes to me, if I'm writing the book in English, in French. It's not always easy to deal with. Sometimes even during an interview somebody can ask me a question in English that I want to answer in French and vice versa - that's the story of my life!

I speak Farsi, German, Dari, and I understand Turkish, but I haven't used it since 1985, so I'm a bit rusty.

I speak English with my dad and Swedish with my mom; it's quite schizophrenic.

I use Mandarin, Korean and English on a daily basis and usually only use Cantonese when I'm speaking with my relatives. I don't think it's very difficult for me to switch between each language because I've been doing it for so long.

I am fluent in Spanish and I understand French, Italian and Portuguese.

I speak English, so I am no longer cute. My tongue itches for French.

If you were to ask me to speak Swedish or Dutch or German, I have no idea if I could pull that off!

I like to travel, and I would love to be fluent in at least four languages.

I don't speak Filipino or Spanish, but I've sung in both.

I think the biggest difficulty is that when I'm here in America, there's a necessity of using English, so I really have a great sense of really wanting to learn, but unfortunately when I head back to Japan, the necessity vanishes and so does my enthusiasm about learning.

I don't speak Spanish, and I get so much crap for it. Oddly enough, it was the first language I learned, but somehow I lost it throughout the years. I can understand pieces of it, but I don't speak it. I need to speak it. I want to teach my kids Spanish.

I had a quick ear and could pick up languages.

I have never been particularly good with languages. Despite a dozen years of Hebrew school and a lifetime of praying in the language, I'm ashamed to admit that I still can't read an Israeli newspaper. Besides English, the only language I speak with any degree of fluency is Spanish.

There is a slam-dunk case for extending foreign language teaching to children aged five. Just as some people have taken a perverse pride in not understanding mathematics, so we have taken a perverse pride in the fact that we do not speak foreign languages, and we just need to speak louder in English.

I speak French, and I grew up with French, so my English is Franglais.

Foreign languages are another favourite topic, and as these men are bilingual they have a fair notion of what it means to speak and think in many different idioms.

I just started taking Mandarin classes. I love the idea of globalization: of being able to work in different countries.

It's funny because I'm so used to acting in English that any time I have these moments where I have to speak Russian, it definitely takes a different part of my brain to pull it off, but it's always nice and fun.

Afrikaans is my first language, although you would never know, as my English accent has more of an American-British thing going on from all my years of travelling.

From 1 till 7, when we moved to England, I spoke only Portuguese.

My biggest regret is that I didn't teach my two children how to speak Spanish.

Born in St. Petersburg, Russia, my wife speaks five languages: Russian, English, French, Italian and, out of self-defense, Spanish. I watched her learn Spanish in three months.

Back home, almost everything I did, I did in Hebrew. I went to drama school in Hebrew, my whole career was in Hebrew, and to switch languages was something that was fascinating and more complicated than I expected it to be, even though I've been speaking English since I could speak.

I'm used to shifting languages because my father used to speak to us, to my brother and I, he used to speak in English. He wanted us to be quite fluent in English, especially when he was trying to correct our behavior; he would do that in English.

Man is multiplied by the number of languages he possesses and speaks.