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Language Acquisition Quotes

Browse 38 quotes about Language Acquisition.

Language Acquisition Quotes

“Pilgrim of Language (Sonnet) How will you know if you can speak another language? If you can curse someone on impulse without memorizing, you got the language in your gut. If you can console someone in pain, the language nestles in your heart. No es necessario que hablar guapisimo, solamente necessario que hablar amable. All those pedestals of language levels, a, b, z, and what not, are elitist garbage. Chase after form, and you'll miss the soul - throw yourself into the soul, and neurons will regrow. Forget grammar, forget vocabulary, let the language seep into your bloodstream. In a world infested with medal-seeking mules, stand odd, stand ablaze, a drunken pilgrim.”

LinguisticsLanguage LearningPolyglotLanguage BarrierMultilingualismNeuroplasticityBilingualLanguage AcquisitionLanguage StudiesLanguage Proficiency
Book:Hazrat-e Humanity: The Uncultured Polyglot
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“As far as the language instinct is concerned, the correlation between genes and languages is a coincidence. People store genes in their gonads and pass them to their children through their genitals; they store grammars in their brains and pass them to their children through their mouths. Gonads and brains are attached to each other in bodies, so when bodies move, genes and grammars move together. That is the only reason that geneticists find any correlation between the two.”

GeneticsLinguisticsLanguage Acquisition
Book:The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language
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“The study of universal grammar is a joint venture between globetrotting theoreticians who worry about impossible grammars and laboratory experimentalists who put young children through these impossible grammars. Perhaps, as in physics, one of these days there will be a grand unified theory of universal grammar. Linguistics today is where physics was in the age of Galileo and Kepler. The collection of principles may one day be replaced by one powerful principle - perhaps just the principle of recursion. that underlies them all. Universal grammar is still waiting for its Newton and Einstein. Whatever it turns out to be, its job its to keep children on the right track to their language.”

Language AcquisitionUniversal Grammar
Book:The Infinite Gift: How Children Learn and Unlearn the Languages of the World
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“When someone recommends a book to you, you know two things; that it is a good book and you have a good friend. If you listen to everybody, you will be nobody. Judge a man by what he tried, not by what he accomplished. People hate what they know but fear what they don't. A curious mind is never bored. Parents, teachers, and politicians should not be judged by their popularity. People believe in everything except the reality.”

KoreanForeign LanguageLanguage LearningLanguage AcquisitionKorean Writers
Author:Min Kim
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“Now we have come full circle to the subtitle of this book: children learn by unlearning other languages. Viewed in the Darwinian light, all humanly possible grammars compete to match the language spoken in the child's environment. And fitness, because we have competition, can be measured by the compatibility of a grammar with what a child hears in a particular linguistic environment. This theory of language takes both nature and nurture into account: nature proposes, and nurture disposes.”

LanguageLanguage Acquisition
Book:The Infinite Gift: How Children Learn and Unlearn the Languages of the World
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“Universal grammar is about what language is: it is to be distinguished from prescriptive grammars, often distilled in newspaper columns, which tell us what language should be. We are all entitled to our own opinions of what is appropriate, be it in the arrangement of words or flowers - as long as we keep in mind that these are just opinions. The properties of universal grammar linguists have unearthed, however, are a useful defense when language "authorities" try to rationalize their pontifications: none of the don'ts they advertise can be found in the book of universal grammar.”

LanguageLanguage AcquisitionUniversal Grammar
Book:The Infinite Gift: How Children Learn and Unlearn the Languages of the World
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“Around this time, I was again tested for partial deafness, for although I could speak I often didn't use language in the same way as others and often got no meaning out of what was said to me. Although words are symbols, it would be misleading to say that I did not understand symbols. I had a whole system of relating that I considered "my language." It was other people who did not understand the symbolism I used, and there was no way I could or was going to tell them what I meant. I developed a language of my own. Everything I did, from holding two fingers together to scrunching up my toes, had a meaning, usually to do with reassuring myself that I was in control and no one could reach me, wherever the hell I was. Sometimes it had to do with telling people how I felt, but it was so subtle it was often unnoticed or simply taken to be some new quirk that "mad Donna" had thought up.”

AutismLanguage Acquisition
Book:Nobody Nowhere: The Extraordinary Autobiography of an Autistic Girl
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“I was beginning to think in Greek. That is the great Rubicon to cross in learning any language. Those in whom the Greek word lives only while they are hunting for it in the lexicon, and who then substitute the English word for it, are not reading the Greek at all; they are only solving a puzzle.”

GreekComprehensionLanguage LearningLanguage AcquisitionGreek Literature
Book:Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life
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“Learn Languages the Right Way. Language acquisition games and abstract communicative method are bullshit. The second-best way to learn a foreign language is alone in a room doing skull-numbing rote memorization of vocabulary, grammar, key phrases, and colloquialisms. The best way is in bed.”

WayGamesLanguageRoomsKeysBedMethodBest WayPhrasesAbstractBullshitRight WayVocabularyGrammarAcquisitionSkullsForeign LanguageSecond BestNumbingLanguage AcquisitionMemorization
Author:Chuck Thompson
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“Dance is the hidden langauge of the soul, of the body.”

InspirationalArtSoulBodyLanguageDancingDanceDancerBalletJust DanceBody LanguageBallet DancerBallroomChoreographersInspirational DanceDance ClassShort DanceBallroom DanceBallroom DancingBallet DanceEnviromentalDance LifeFlamencoBallet DancingMotivational DanceArt DanceDancers InspirationFunny DanceBallet ClassLanguage AcquisitionClassical DanceDance PerformanceLanguage And CommunicationLanguages CommunicationDance Is LifeInternational LanguagePointePointe DancersBeautiful DanceLanguage ArtsDance Teacher
Author:Martha Graham
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“UG [universal grammar] may be regarded as a characterization of the genetically determined language faculty. One may think of thisfaculty as a 'language acquisition device,' an innate component of the human mind that yields a particular language through interaction with present experience, a device that converts experience into a system of knowledge attained: knowledge of one or another language.”

ThinkingMindHumansMayLanguageParticularUniversalDeterminedDevicesFacultyYieldHuman MindInteractionComponentsGrammarInnateAcquisitionCharacterizationLanguage Acquisition
Author:Noam Chomsky
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“Some innate capacity - some part of the human genetic endowment - enters into language acquisition. That much is uncontroversial among those who believe that humans are part of the natural world. If it were not true, would be a miracle that my granddaughter reflexively identified some elements of the blooming buzzing confusion as language-related and went on to acquire capacities of the kind that you and I are now exercising, while her pet kitten (chimp, songbird, bee...), presented with exactly the same data, could not take the first step, let alone the later ones.”

IfsWorldFirstsBelieveHumansKindWould BeLanguageNaturalStepsExerciseElementsCapacityMiracleConfusionDataRelatedAcquirePetFirst StepsBeesInnateNatural WorldAcquisitionKittenEndowmentBloomingGranddaughterLanguage AcquisitionSongbirds
Author:Noam Chomsky
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