Maria Montessori Quotes

Obviously no language is innate. Take any kid from any race, bring them up in any culture and they will learn the language equally quickly. So no particular language is in the genes. But what might be in the genes is the ability to acquire language.

I have been challenged with the fictional languages I have to learn. I wasn't terrible at languages at school - I got an A in French, so I did well enough - but I didn't enjoy them. I'm not even sure if that plays into how well you learn a fictional language!

It is much easier to learn another language when you are young, enthusiastic and unembarrassed.

It is not easy, but young people have to learn languages.

You always speak the language you hear most.

The linguistic clumsiness of tourists and students might be the price we pay for the linguistic genius we displayed as babies, just as the decrepitude of age in the price we pay for the vigor of youth.

I listen to people talking sometimes, that great river that is language, with all its undercurrents of grammar and nuance, and I wonder how we all learn so quickly to speak it, given that we begin when we are barely old enough to stand upright. I have no memory of finding it hard. Indeed, I have no memory of it at all.

There is a certain age at which a child looks at you in all earnestness and delivers a long, pleased speech in all the true inflections of spoken English, but with not one recognizable syllable. There is no way you can tell the child that if language had been a melody, he had mastered it and done well, but that since it was in fact a sense, he had botched it utterly.

At about a year and a half, the child discovers another fact, and that is that each thing has its own name.

Learning to speak was the most remarkable thing you ever did.

It's important to me to work in my own language now and then. I love English, but you can never learn to master a foreign language if you're not brought up with it.

What's always a challenge for me is that my Spanish is not the level of my English. Nor do I read in Spanish the way I read in English.

I had a quick ear and could pick up languages.

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.

It is no secret that the fruits of language study are in no sort of relation to the labour spent on teaching and learning them.

I never had to learn English, French and German because I was brought up as all three languages. I had a private French teacher before I even went to school. That helped a lot.

Henceforth, language studies were no longer directed merely towards correcting grammar.

To be functionally fluent in a language, for instance, in most cases you need about 1,200 words. To acquire a total of vocabulary words, if you really train someone well they can acquire 200 to 300 words a day, which means that in a week they can acquire the vocabulary necessary to speak a language.

The only language men ever speak perfectly is the one they learn in babyhood, when no one can teach them anything!

When I was in Mexico and started to dream in Spanish, I knew that was a good sign that I was learning the language. It was cool.

Let's see to it that our children, our young people, learn English.

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

If a child from an Amazonian hunter-gatherer tribe comes to Boston, is raised in Boston, that child will be indistinguishable in language capacities from my children growing up here, and vice versa.

English, for me, is an acquired language. I started with English at the age of 10. At the time, it was my third language.

It is the children between five and seven who are the word-lovers. It is they who show a predisposition toward such study. Their undeveloped minds can not yet grasp a complete idea with distinctness. They do, however, understand words. And they may be entirely carried away by their ecstatic, their tireless interest in the parts of speech.