Language Acquisition Quotes

“Language is best taught when it is being used to transmit messages, not when it is explicitly taught for conscious learning.”
― Stephen D. Krashen, The Natural Approach: Language Acquisition in the Classroom

“The next time you see a baby, remember that there is a powerful statistical computer in front of you”
― Albert Costa, The Bilingual Brain: And What It Tells Us about the Science of Language

“(...) Language acquisition might be like other biological functions. The linguistic clumsiness of tourists and students might be the price we pay for the linguistic genius we displayed as babies, just as the decrepitude of age is the price we pay for the vigor of youth.”
― Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

“The child's reluctance to speak for the first few months of his residence in a new country is not pathological, but normal.”
― Stephen D. Krashen, The Input Hypothesis: Issues and Implications

“Older acquirers progress more quickly in early stages because they obtain more comprehensible input, while younger acquirers do better in the long run because of their lower affective filters.”
― Stephen D. Krashen, The Input Hypothesis: Issues and Implications

“Das mine!' protested Ava, Bennie's daughter, affirming Alex's recent theory that language acquisition involved a phase of speaking German. She snatched a plastic skillet away from his own daughter, Cara-Ann, who lurched after it, roaring, 'Mine pot! Mine pot!”
― Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

“Not all babies learn to play chess or hunt penguins or play the didgeridoo, but except in cases of pathology they all master their first language. Indeed, failure to master one’s first language is taken to reflect a pathological condition; failing to master algebra or the piccolo has no such implication.”
― Neilson Voyne Smith, Chomsky: Ideas and Ideals

“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.”
― Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

“The central hypothesis of the theory is that language acquisition occurs in only one way: by understanding messages.”
― Stephen D. Krashen, The Natural Approach: Language Acquisition in the Classroom

“The language of academic discourse, which is crucial to academic progress beyond grade 3 is learned by all children through literacy: there are no native speakers of academic language!”
― L. W. Fillmore

“The truth is that bilingual babies are like machines.”
― Albert Costa, The Bilingual Brain: And What It Tells Us about the Science of Language

“Language is the highway to culture.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Azad Earth Army: When The World Cries Blood

“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.”
― Charles Yang, The Infinite Gift: How Children Learn and Unlearn the Languages of the World

“The totality of utterances that can be made in a speech community is the language of that speech community.”
― Leonard Bloomfield, An introduction to the study of language

“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.”
― Min Kim

“Children's minds need not innately embody language structures, if languages embody the predispositions of children's minds!”
― Terrence W. Deacon, The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain

“Proper pronunciation is essential for clarity in effective communication. By aiming to be clear in your speech, you'll build self-confidence and credibility.”
― Adriana Vandelinde

“The widely documented failure of late starters to achieve native-like proficiency, even when motivation, cognitive abilities, and opportunities are optimal and plentiful, all agree, is one of the most salient facts about SLA. It is a weighty empirical problem, in Laudan's sense, crying out for a solution.”
― Michael H. Long, Problems in Second Language Acquisition

“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.”
― Charles Yang, The Infinite Gift: How Children Learn and Unlearn the Languages of the World

“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.”
― Charles Yang, The Infinite Gift: How Children Learn and Unlearn the Languages of the World

“Um eine fremde Sprache recht gut sprechen zu lernen, und würklich in Gesellschaft zu sprechen mit dem eigentlichen Akzent des Volks, muß man nicht allein Gedächtnis und Ohr haben, sondern auch in gewissem Grad ein kleiner Geek sein.”
― Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Lichtenberg Schriften und Briefe Band 1

“One of the primary jobs for a baby during the first months of learning is to build what we call a sound inventory of the language to which he or she is exposed.”
― Albert Costa, The Bilingual Brain: And What It Tells Us about the Science of Language

“The fastest way to learn a language is to tell the truth.”
― Karl Kristian Flores, The Goodbye Song

“Grammar is just like a jigsaw puzzle. When putting a puzzle together, one should sort the pieces by colors, groups, and patterns to identify different sections of it because organizing the pieces effectively allows for efficient and timely assembly. The same happens with language, knowing its elements and how they work together allow for clear and effective communication.”
― Adriana Vandelinde

“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.”
― Donna Williams, Nobody Nowhere: The Extraordinary Autobiography of an Autistic Girl

“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.”
― C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life

“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.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Hazrat-e Humanity: The Uncultured Polyglot