Eric Nam Quotes

I would be criticized, like, 'You don't talk Korean enough. You sound very American. You sound very white in your music.' And I'm like, 'Whoa.'

I came here when I was almost 22. I'm perfectly bilingual, but I'm never going to sound like Sandra Bullock.

I still have an accent. But when I return to Prague, I speak the language yet do not know what they are talking about.

I have a strong accent; it limits the roles, of course it does. I guess if I had moved to America a long time ago maybe my accent would have got less.

When Nigeria actually gave me the call-up I thought 'oh, it's going to be a challenge, I don't go back there a lot, I don't really speak the language.' I wasn't speaking the language as fluently as I am now, so it was always going to be a challenge, but it was a challenge I decided to take and change nationalities.

I've been a loner all my life, so it didn't bother me that Hungarian was my first language and that I had to learn English. I had a pretty heavy accent in junior high school and would say things like 'wolume control' instead of 'volume control.'

When I went to London, they told me I spoke with a funny accent - English with a Chinese accent.

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.

When I first came to this country, I didn't know how to speak English.

My mom used to call me a parrot, because the way I spoke would change in every country we'd go to.

Every time a director calls me and says, 'If you practice a lot in two months, can you be an American?' And I always tell them, 'Well, maybe but I'm French. So it's going to be hard to be someone else.'

I look at myself, and I see a Spanish person who's trying to be understood by an English-speaking audience and is putting a lot of energy into that, instead of into expressing himself freely and feeling comfortable.

Whenever I'm in the U.K., people say I have an American accent. Which is, obviously, funny.

Anyone that has come to America past the age of eighteen will be able to understand when I say that you can never shake your accent.

My grandmothers are Irish-American and German-American; my grandfather is from the Caribbean. My father is African-American. My family looked funny. I just started naturally imitating whoever I was talking to. I didn't want to be a phony, but I felt very authentic in the moment.

In Paris, one is always reminded of being a foreigner. If you park your car wrong, it is not the fact that it's on the sidewalk that matters, but the fact that you speak with an accent.

My accent remained terrible. It was very hard for me to initiate any conversation with someone I didn't know.

I didn't move to Miami to live in a Spanish-speaking province.

My wife has a horror the children will start talking American if we spend too much time out there.

If I were bombing with my jokes in English, I would go back to France. Maybe do that mime thing.

I've played American characters before, so I've naturally become more at ease. Still, there are some American words that I cannot get my tongue around, but if you keep it flowing, you are never too far away from the truth.

I went to an English school and was brought up in English. So I don't feel Czech.

When I was 10 years old, we moved to Spain with my mother. I learned Spanish before I learned English. But the English language stayed with me.

I was hesitant about doing too big a role in an American movie because it meant losing my German accent.

I don't know Bengali perfectly. I don't know how to write it or even read it. I have an accent, I speak without authority, and so I've always perceived a disjunction between it and me. As a result, I consider my mother tongue, paradoxically, a foreign language.