A Quote by Lee Kuan Yew
My children were educated in what were then Chinese schools, and they learned English as a subject. But they made up when they went to English-language universities. So they didn't lose out. They had a basic set of traditional Confucian values. Not my grandchildren.
Quote Topics
Quote Author
Related Quotes
I grew up bilingual, I grew up speaking Chinese in the home, Mandarin Chinese with my parents, and I learned English because I was born and raised in the U.S. That really gave me an edge. I understand that, from the experts, if you grew up bilingual, your brain kind of gets wired to accept a new language. It was a very serious deal because not only did I have to learn Russian to a high degree in order to function as a necessary member of the crew, but also I knew that the Russians that came over that made an effort and had some success in learning English, those were the folks we trusted.
I have a funny relationship to language. When I came to California when I was three I spoke Urdu fluently and I didn't speak a word of English. Within a few months I lost all my Urdu and spoke only English and then I learned Urdu all over again when I was nine. Urdu is my first language but it's not as good as my English and it's sort of become my third language. English is my best language but was the second language I learned.
James Joyce's English was based on the rhythm of the Irish language. He wrote things that shocked English language speakers but he was thinking in Gaelic. I've sung songs that if they were in English, would have been banned too. The psyche of the Irish language is completely different to the English-speaking world.
English is not the primary language for universities in China, Korea, and Japan, but they are being evaluated on the basis of publications in English and courses taught in English.
My grandparents were far more English in their manners than they were Chinese. For example, we spoke English at home, had afternoon tea every day, and my grandfather, who attended university in Scotland, would smoke his pipe after dinner.
Sometimes I wonder how my life would have worked out if my books had been translated into English sooner, because English is the language that's spoken worldwide, and when a book appears in English it is made universal, it becomes a global publication.
Growing up was very interesting for me. If you were Haitian, people just automatically assumed that English was a second language. So they had a special class for my brother and I, but we spoke proper English.
I spent ten years in London; I trained there. But because I started in English, it kind of feels the most natural to me, to act in English, which is a strange thing. My language is Spanish; I grew up in Argentina. I speak to my family in Spanish, but if you were to ask me what language I connect with, it'd be English in some weird way.
Language-wise, my mom and dad's dialect, they're pretty obscure. It's Chinese, but not your traditional Chinese, like Cantonese or Mandarin. It wasn't something that I got to use very much growing up. We eventually just spoke English around the house.
My husband and I, when we had our five children and they were grown, we thought we were entitled to grandchildren. And so we were just expecting this to happen; of course, nothing was happening. And then we kept begging, bribing, cajoling, anything - threatening to adopt our own grandchildren - and finally, we got some grandchildren.
Malcolm Bradbury made the point, and I don't know whether it's a valid one or not, that the real English at the moment is not the English spoken in England or in America or even in Canada or Australia or New Zealand. The real English is the English which is a second language, so that it's rather like Latin in the days of the Roman Empire when people had their own languages, but had Latin in order to communicate.
English is the largest of human tongues, with several times the vocabulary of the second largest language -- this alone made it inevitable that English would eventually become, as it did, the lingua franca of this planet, for it is thereby the richest and most flexible -- despite its barbaric accretions . . . or, I should say, because of its barbaric accretions. English swallows up anything that comes its way, makes English out of it.
There's inherent cultural imbalance whenever you're translating from Chinese to English. Educated Chinese readers are expected not only to know about all the Chinese references - history, language, culture, all this stuff - but to be well-versed in Western references as well.
We were living with Bernard [Leach] in his home. He had a fantastic collection of early English and Japanese and Chinese and Korean pots and German pots, contemporary English work as well. And we had access to this collection.
The larger an English industry was, the more likely it was to go bankrupt, because the English were not naturally corporate people; they disliked working for others and they seemed to resent taking orders. On the whole, directors were treated absurdly well, and workers badly, and most industries were weakened by class suspicion and false economies and cynicism. But the same qualities that made English people seem stubborn and secretive made them, face to face, reliable and true to their word. I thought: The English do small things well and big things badly.
Actually, I've taught creative writing in Turkey, at an English language university, where the students were native Turkish speakers, but they were writing their essays in English, and they were very interesting - even the sense of structure, the conventions of writing, the different styles of writing.
Related Authors
Angela Merkel Quotes
German
Statesman
Bashar al-Assad Quotes
Syrian
Statesman
Colin Powell Quotes
American
Statesman
Condoleezza Rice Quotes
American
Statesman
Edmund Burke Quotes
Irish
Statesman
Fidel Castro Quotes
Cuban
Statesman
Indira Gandhi Quotes
Indian
Statesman
Kofi Annan Quotes
Ghanaian
Statesman
Lucius Annaeus Seneca Quotes
Roman
Statesman
Madeleine Albright Quotes
American
Statesman
Marcus Tullius Cicero Quotes
Roman
Statesman
Napoleon Bonaparte Quotes
French
Statesman
Nelson Mandela Quotes
South African
Statesman
Thabo Mbeki Quotes
South African
Statesman
Tony Blair Quotes
English
Statesman
Winston Churchill Quotes
British
Statesman