Language Anxiety Quotes

When I speak to people from Britain, that's when I feel like a fake, speaking with an American accent.

I feel comfortable in Spanish, I chat like a parrot, but I don't have the confidence in Spanish that I do in English.

I think I am less self-assured when I write English than I would be if I were writing in my first language. I have to test each sentence over and over to be sure that it's right, that I haven't introduced some element that isn't English.

We agreed that people are now afraid of the English language. He [T.S. Eliot] said it came of being bookish, but not reading books enough. One should read all styles thoroughly.

I was always, and I still am to a certain extent, one of those lazy people who spends a lot of time with Italian friends and yet constantly says I don't speak Italian. Things slow down when I start speaking Italian.

I'm more relaxed. I know I have difficulties with some verbs. But if they get me, they get me. And if they don't understand me, they don't understand me.

I'm not exactly an example of how to learn English; I just can't get it into my head. I'm learning hardly anything, truth be told.

My thought process is in Malayalam. So, every time I have to work outside Malayalam, the process is a little stressful. I have to translate my Malayalam thoughts into English and back to Tamil.

I had to struggle with the language. I can understand Hindi now, but I still can't communicate. And things get lost in translation; I feel rejected all the time.

Even when I use a word in the wrong order in a sentence, I get mad. It's very stressful.

What I didn't say was that each time I picked up a German dictionary or a German book, the very sight of those dense, black, barbed-wire letters made my mind shut like a clam.

It's hard for me to perform in English.

It's difficult for me to write in English as it's not my first language, but French is even worse because of my father's influence and because the comparisons that I - not even other people - would make.

Writing about writing is a bit like talking about a conversation you are having; it tends to obscure desperation about where the next word is coming from.

To see yourself on the big screen, you're big, you hate your voice, your vocabulary. You say the same words, you speak bad.

It is a sore point, because you do have advantages if you have access to more than one language. You also have problems, because on bad days you don't trust yourself, either in your first or your second language, and so you feel like a complete halfwit.

We fret about words, we writers. Words mean. Words point. They are arrows. Arrows stuck in the rough hide of reality. And the more portentous, more general the word, the more they can also resemble rooms or tunnels. They can expand, or cave in. They can come to be filled with a bad smell. They will often remind us of other rooms, where we'd rather dwell or where we think we are already living. They can be spaces we lose the art or the wisdom of inhabiting. And eventually those volumes of mental intention we no longer know how to inhabit will be abandoned, boarded up, closed down.

There is the fear, common to all English-only speakers, that the chief purpose of foreign languages is to make fun of us. Otherwise, you know, why not just come out and say it?

I'm not too bad at reading, but I've got a bit of a confidence problem with speaking, with going from Scouse to Spanish.

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.

Nothing makes you feel more stupid than learning a new language. You lose your confidence. You want to disappear. Not be noticed. Say as little as possible.

I think my biggest fear is trying to communicate in Spanish with someone I don't know and them laughing at me or thinking it's awful, but for the most part, people I've encountered just see that I'm trying, and they're helpful. It's helpful to me to communicate with people.

Writers who hedge their use of unfamiliar, infrequent, or informal words with 'I know that's not a real word,' hoping to distance themselves from criticism, run the risk of creating doubt where perhaps none would have naturally arisen.

People are often shy to acknowledge that they are Bengalis. They somehow take pride in saying that they cannot speak or read the language.

I sometimes feel nervous because I give stupid answers to certain pointless questions. It happens in Turkish as much as in English. I speak bad Turkish and utter stupid sentences.