Stephen A. Schwarzman Quotes

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.

Our common language is English. And our common task is to ensure that our non-English-speaking children learn this common language.

English is not my first language.

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.

In my time, you needed to speak a little Italian, and that was it.

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.

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

All the kids are learning different languages. I asked them what languages they wanted to learn, and Shi is learning Khmai, which is a Cambodian language; Pax is focusing on Vietnamese, Mad has taken to German and Russian, Z is speaking French, Vivienne really wanted to learn Arabic, and Knox is learning sign language.

Fluency in even one other language would be fantastic.

Growing up in Switzerland, you learn German pretty much from day one in school. You learn French and Italian as well. I took English as an extra language because I figured that was the language of the world.

I've never learned to speak a foreign language with ease.

I wish I knew more languages.

I don't speak any other languages, which I'm kind of ashamed about, actually.

Nothing in my younger life could have told me I would have needed to know how to speak English.

Math and science fields are not the only areas where we see the United States lagging behind. Less than 1 percent of American high school students study the critical foreign languages of Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean or Russian, combined.

I would like to speak 10 languages.

I don't speak Spanish, I speak a little of Italian but no Spanish.

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

I had the luck that my parents educated me in three languages. With my mother I spoke Dutch, with my father Italian, and in the school I learned German. But my host language is Italian.

My mom taught me German before I knew English. And I went to French immersion school.

I speak French fluently, so that really helped.

Well it is sometimes difficult to act in another language.

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.

When you grow up in a family of languages, you develop a kind of casual fluency, so that languages, though differently colored, all seem transparent to experience.

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.