Language Mastery Quotes

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.

I'm not a writer. I know a lot of writers; I know a handful of really excellent, great ones, and I know what they're like. They are in love with language. They're obsessed with it. Even if their thoughts aren't more special than anybody else's, they have a way of putting them into words that makes them sensational.

Also, they don't understand - writing is language. The use of language. The language to create image, the language to create drama. It requires a skill of learning how to use language.

I admire people who dare to take the language, English, and understand it and understand the melody.

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.

I think it'd be pretty cool to fly. Actually, I'd like to be Language Gal. My super power is that I can speak every language.

Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man.

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.

I've been working in three-four languages. I'm happy to do it.

Anything well written with good language and clarity and honesty is worth doing. It comes out of the same tradition as Shakespeare.

Now when I had mastered the language of this water, and had come to know every trifling feature that bordered the great river as familiarly as I knew the letters of the alphabet, I had made a valuable acquisition. But I had lost something, too. I had lost something which could never be restored me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry, had gone out of the majestic river!

Loving your language means a command of its vocabulary beyond the level of the everyday.

Language is the crowning achievement of human beings, and that is something Muslims have always known and revered. We are a literate people whose miracle is a Book from an unlettered man, peace and blessings be upon him, who was the most articulate and eloquent human being who ever lived. We honor our Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, in honoring language that he loved so much and used so well.

The conquest of learning is achieved through the knowledge of languages.

If you want to deliver as an actor, you need to know the language. If you don't know what you are mouthing, how will you perform? For me, it is important to know the language.

To money, the finest linguist in the world!

So many problems are solved simply by knowing enough verbs.

I had been writing poems and stories since I learned to make letters. I had placed poems in a hardcover anthology at the age of 6. And I knew more big words than anyone else in the 10th grade.

Her fluency was marvelous. She would say things at random, intricate, flamelike, or slide off into a parenthetical limbo peppered with fireworks-- admirable linguistic feats which a practiced writer might struggle for hours to achieve.

I have felt great advances in my poetry, the main one being a growing victory over word nuances and a superfluity of adjectives.

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

Knowing Latin and having two years of Attic Greek gave me the strong foundation upon which I've built a career. I think the classical training, more than anything, has provided me with longevity.

Yeats was the greatest poet of our times . . . certainly the greatest in this language, and so far as I am able to judge, in any language.

When I first came to this country I could not speak English. Now I get paid to write it.

Your words are so powerful and precious. Learn to harness them, guide them and let them work for you.