Quotes about language learning
Getting and staying motivated about language learning is an important part of the journey. Language learning is a marathon, not a sprint (that’s not one of the official quotes about language learning, but it’s still true!), and that means that initial motivation will eventually fall away.
[convertkit form=1363388]If you need a quick pick-me-up to keep your language learning motor running, check out these quotes about language learning. I hope they help!
“If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his own language, that goes to his heart.”
-Nelson Mandela
“One language sets you in a corridor for life. Two languages open every door along the way.”
-Frank Smith
“The limits of my language are the limits of my world.”
-Ludwig Wittgenstein
“You can never understand one language until you understand at least two.”
-Geoffrey Willans
“To have another language is to possess a second soul.”
-Charlemagne
“Those who know nothing of foreign languages know nothing of their own.”
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“Language is the road map of a culture. It tells you where its people come from and where they are going.”
-Rita Mae Brown
“Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow.”
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
“Each time a language dies, another flame goes out, another sound goes silent.”
-Ariel Sabar
“Languages, just like people, are worlds within themselves. They have the incredible ability to provide us with a clearer, more profound and detailed perspective of a culture and its views on life, nature, and death.”
-Orge Castellano
“The great enemy of foreign language learning is a sense of shame, an inability or unwillingness to become like a child again and let one’s inadequacies show.”
-Herbert A Simon
“The traditional way of learning a language (cramming 20-30 words a day and digesting the grammar supplied by a teacher or coursebook) may satisfy at most one’s sense of duty, but it can hardly serve as a source of joy. Nor will it likely be successful.”
-Kató Lomb
“The brain is more like a muscle and less like a storage area. If you really want to be a writer, you should want to write a lot. If you want to write a lot, then you need to be in training. You are preparing to run marathons, not emptying a suitcase.
Learning new languages, acquiring new vocabulary, keeping yourself in various forms of constant logocentric discipline is one of the best things you can do. And language acquisition is nothing if not logocentric discipline.”
-Douglas Wilson
“Spend time tinkering with the language every day. If time is short, try at least to produce a 10-minute monologue.”
-Kató Lomb
“It is a curse not speaking languages and in a broken world more important than ever before.
-Clifford Thurlow
“You want the 3 golden rules to learn any language? Use it or lose it. Love it or leave it. Feel it or fail it.
-Safir Kassim Boudjelal
“To speak a foreign language is a matter of practice, and mistakes will be made. Unfortunately, it is difficult for intellectually confident people to accept making mistakes. Therefore they may refrain from speaking.”
-Kató Lomb
“Should ‘sleep’ be plural? No, sleep is an idea, like love, no s. So many decisions in a single simple sentence. Exhausting, this elaborate dance of words.”
-Thanhha Lai
“Language is best taught when it is being used to transmit messages, not when it is explicitly taught for conscious learning.”
-Stephen D. Krashen
“…it always felt good to have that moment of resolve, like saying “I’m going to learn French!” It doesn’t matter if you do it or not, deciding is the high, right?”
-Felicia Day
“We should learn languages because language is the only thing worth knowing even poorly.”
-Kató Lomb
“Learning a new language, just like opening a new window, allows you to see the world with intimacy.”
-Pearl Zhu
“Sanskrit is a beautiful contextual language. It is called “Dev Bhasha” the language of the soul. Here, meanings of the worlds must come from the heart, from direct experience - dictionary meanings of static meanings have not much value.
Meanings of the words vary depending on mindset, time, location, and culture. The words are made to expand the possibilities of the mind.”
-Amit Ray
“I speak languages with more ease than I read or write them, she explains. It is something in the feel of the sounds. I could attempt to put them on paper but I am sure the result would be appalling.”
-Erin Morgenstern
“The Scots language is a mark of the distinctive identity of the Scottish people; and as such we should be concerned to preserve it, even if there were no other reason, because it is ours. This statement requires neither explanation nor apology.”
-J. Derrick McClure
“Some studies of successful language learners have suggested that they’re more “open to new experiences” than the rest of us. Temptingly, psychologist Alexander Guiora proposed that we have a self that’s bound up in our native language, a “language ego”, which needs to be loose and more permeable to learn a new language.
Those with more fluid ego boundaries, like children and people who have drunk some alcohol, are more willing to sound not like themselves, which means they have better accents in the new language.”
-Michael Erard
“My love for languages and my love for travel really go hand in hand and feed off of each other. There’s no better way to learn a language than by immersing yourself in a culture where it’s spoken, and there’s no better way to immerse yourself in a culture than by learning to speak the local language.”
-Wendy Werneth
“Grammar is the breathing power for the life of language.”
-Munia Khan
“It is astonishing how much enjoyment one can get out of a language that one understands imperfectly.”
-Basil Gildersleeve
“With languages, you can move from one social situation to another. With languages, you are at home anywhere.”
-Edmund de Waal
“The difference between a stumbling block and a stepping stone is how high you raise your foot.”
-Benny Lewis
“Write it as easy as you think about the difficulty.”
-Cucuk Espe
“The joy of knowing a foreign language is inexpressible. I find it really difficult to express such joy in my mother tongue.”
-Munia Khan
“A different language is a different vision of life.”
-Federico Fellini
“Language comes first. It’s not that language grows out of consciousness, if you haven’t got language, you can’t be conscious.”
-Alan Moore
“Do you know what a foreign accent is? It’s a sign of bravery.”
-Amy Chua
“Learn a language, and you’ll avoid a war.”
-Arab Proverb
“Language shapes the way we think, and determines what we can think about.”
-Benjamin Whorf
“Learning is a treasure that will follow its owner everywhere.”
-Chinese Proverb
“With languages, you are at home anywhere.”
-Edward De Waal
“I love commuting between languages just like I love commuting between cultures and cities.”
-Elif Safak
“To learn a language is to have on more window from which to look at the world.”
-Chinese Proverb
“Learning another language is not only learning different words for the same things, but learning another way to think about things.”
-Flora Lewis
“Learning a new language is becoming a member of the club - the community of speakers of that language.”
-Frank Smith
“You live a new life for every new language you speak. If you know only one language, you live only once.”
-Czech Proverb
“One language sets you in a corridor for life. Two languages open every door along the way.”
-Frank Smith
“Learn a new language and get a new soul.”
-Czech Proverb
“A man who knows two languages is worth two men.”
-French Proverb
“A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language.”
-Gaston Bachelard
“A foreign language is like a frail, delicate muscle. If you do not use it, it weakens.”
-Jhumpa Lahiri
“Change your language and you change your thoughts.”
-Karl Albrecht
“A new language is a new life.”
-Persian Proverb
“Knowledge of languages is the doorway to wisdom.”
-Roger Bacon
“Speak a new language so that the world will be a new world.”
-Rumi
“I am always sorry when any language is lost, because languages are the pedigrees of nations.”
-Samuel Johnson
“The man who does not know other languages, unless he is a man of genius, necessarily has deficiencies in his ideas.”
-Victor Hugo
“Language is wine upon the lips.”
-Virginia Woolf
“Language is to the mind more than light is to the eye.”
-William Gibson
“As a hawk flieth not high with one wine, even so a man reacheth not to excellence with one tongue.”
-Roger Ascham
“Learning another language is like becoming another person.”
-Haruki Murakami
Any time you think some other language is strange, remember that yours is just as strange, you’re just used to it.”
-Anonymous
“Language exerts hidden power, like a moon on the tides.”
-Rita Mae Brown
Hopefully these quotes about language learning are just the thing you need to remember why you love language learning (even when it sucks).
Did I miss any quotes about language learning that help you when you’re feeling frustrated and like you want to quit? Leave me a comment and let me know!
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