Andrew Cohen Quotes

Maybe then you comprehend, speaking one language only is a prison!

I'm pretty good with languages. I know a bit of French and actually want to live in France some day so that I can get fluent. I think it'd be tragic to go through life only knowing one language.

Even though I have spent literally years of my life trying to learn another language, any other language - and even though I have in the past claimed in several key professional contexts that I speak other languages - I am in fact still trapped inside the bubble of English.

Globalization has brought a proliferation of such environments, so that even monolinguals must increasingly learn to live and act multilingually.

The idea of Homo monolinguis - one-languaged man - the idea of children having to grow into one system before we confuse them with another mental system, is an idea with which, unfortunately, many people are brought up now.

Neither in French nor in English nor in Mexican.

I tried to learn the languages - Italian, Spanish, and German - not to successfully. Working on a European set isn't a hell of a lot different from working on an American set.

I may speak many languages, but there remains one in which I live.

Nobody should call themselves a professional if they only knew one language.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Since my Japanese isn't very good, I had to have an interpreter to communicate with most of the crew.

There are very few places in the world where you have to learn a language with no language in common. It's called a monolingual field situation.

I have a funny accent in every language.

My language is what I use, and if I lost that, I wouldn't be able to say anything.

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.

Language is a social art.

You only have to look at London, where almost half of all primary school children speak English as a second language, to see the challenges we now face as a country. This isn't fair to anyone: how can people build relationships with their neighbours if they can't even speak the same language?

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.

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

With the United States in slow long-term decline, how will that affect the position of English? And where will all that leave monolingual Britain? Our political leaders like to boast about how global Britain is, but when it comes to languages, it is near the bottom of the global league, together with another island state, Japan.

One of the biggest problems is - you know, I've got some Hispanic friends - is that a lot of those folks that don't know English, is primarily because they don't even know Spanish. They don't even know their own language.

There are so many people in the world who cannot read English or French or whatever.

I always try to learn a few words from a new language wherever I go.

Everyone knows English is my second language and my vocabulary is not as broad as it is in Spanish, and because of this, sometimes I use the wrong words to express myself.

Everybody at home speaks mandarin except me.