Language Gap Quotes

I haven't spoken English with native speakers in several months. I've been speaking Arabic.

I hate when I see someone who speaks English speaking to someone who speaks a different language, and they're screaming as if going louder is going to help the other person understand.

I don't know what the word is in Austrian.

In the British embassy in Afghanistan in 2008, an embassy of 350 people, there were only three people who could speak Dari, the main language of Afghanistan, at a decent level. And there was not a single Pashto speaker.

Because there'd be two languages I couldn't speak, French and English.

She is written in a foreign tongue.

We're down in Mexico. It's for a bachelor party, so we go into a Mexican strip club... I go back with this woman down a murky hallway, and then without missing a beat - these ladies are all business - she goes, 'Go ahead, take out your dong.' 'I'm not taking out my dong. And by the way, who uses the word dong? If you want to be hip to the lingo, they're not using the word dong up in the States.

I'm the minority in my house sometimes. My wife is Swedish, and we go to Sweden and everyone is rattling off in Swedish. It's like, 'OK, I can just read a book.'

I have to slow down for some people. In Louisiana, people didn't have a clue what I was talking about. I remember seeing people glaze over. Seeing the moment where they've just completely lost all... They just wait for me to stop talking and then say, 'Yeah.'

Though I can speak only tooti futi Gujarati, I can understand it completely.

I read French much better than I speak.

The diversity of language alienates man from man

The barrier of communication is terrible if you don't speak the language. You cannot reach a player with a translator.

We feel in one world, we think and name in another. Between the two we can set up a system of references, but we cannot fill in the gap.

The most basic barrier was language itself, very few Americans in Iraq whether soldiers or diplomats or news paper reporters could speak more than a few words of Arabic. A remarkable number of them didn't even have translators. That meant for many Iraqis the typical 19 year old army corporal from South Dakota was not a youthful innocent carrying Americas good will, he was a terrifying combination of firepower and ignorance.

I have a major problem with the division that occurs because of the division of language.

Our culture is like a garment that does not fit us, or in any case no longer fits us. This culture is like a dead language that no longer has anything in common with the language of the street. It is increasingly alien to our lives.

Why is there such a gap between nonspeaking animals and speaking man, when there is no other such gap in nature?

Everybody at home speaks mandarin except me.

I understand Spanish better than I speak it.

My mother-in-law speaks not a word of English. I speak not a word of Tajiki. So I smile at her ingratiatingly and she fixes me with a beady eye.

I took an estimated two thousand years of high school French, and when I finally got to France, I discovered that I didn't know one single phrase that was actually useful in a real-life French situation.

The only problem was that I couldn't communicate with Dario. He speaks Italian and I don't. We had a translator the whole time. I just felt that something was lost with the go between. He was a delightful man, but I wish we could have spoken the same language.

My grandmother died in 1991 and I was born in '86. We only met once, but I didn't speak English and she didn't speak Spanish - so we had a communication problem.

Sadly, my German is almost non-existent, although I did a little at school.