Wer fremde Sprachen nicht kennt, weiss nichts von seiner eigenen.He who is ignorant of foreign languages, knows not his own.
The thing that got me to change was when my kids would come and tell me I was swearing on TV, so I knew I wanted to make a change.
First learn the meaning of what you say, and then speak.
I think drama school really teaches you how to annunciate; you're conscious that people might not understand you if you speak too fast and too Welsh.
I used to keep a dictionary and work with it and then I realized there are more words that exist in the English language than there are in this dictionary.
I think, look, you have to be aware of the language, and you have to be aware a little bit of your own biases if you're going to overcome them.
I overuse words. My kids catch me saying stuff. They're like, 'Hey, you say that all the time.' 'Boom' is one of those things.
I remember as a child of five or six lying in the bath marvelling at the different languages displayed on the shampoo bottles around me. From that moment on it was always words not numbers that held a fascination for me.
Yet no one hears his own remarks as prose.
I cannot speak well enough to be unintelligible.
Because everyone uses language to talk, everyone thinks he can talk about language.
All of us, just because we are able to talk, also believe we are able to talk about language.
I have an acquired taste for language, yet it is seldom an actual focus of mine.
I'm not conscious of having changed my accent.
He who does not love his own language is worse than an animal and smelly fish.
I became aware that all sounds can make meaningful language.
I was never allowed to read the popular American children's books of my day because, as my mother said, the children spoke bad English without the author's knowing it.
I know Hindi.
Writing poetry makes you intensely conscious of how words sound, both aloud and inside the head of the reader. You learn the weight of words and how they sound to the ear.
I've had fans coming up to me and speaking Chinese or Japanese. It's not a case of mistaken nationality. I just don't think they realise that we don't all speak the same language.
My grandfather, mother and father were gifted verbally, and my mother passed that along to me. She always made sure I was conscious of language and words.
I'm actually all for political correctness. If you want to work to change the usage of a word that's discriminatory then fine, I'm behind you. But that's a conversation that needs to be had in the culture. You can't just decide that commonly used parts of a language are evil and that the people who didn't get the memo must be bad people.
We live in an ocean of words, but like a fish in water we are often not aware of it.
Kids in school told me my parents had accents, but I had no idea; they've always sounded that way to me.
Just because I have a good vocabulary, I don't think of myself as anachronistic - just because I try not to use the word 'like' every other word.
