Your emotional love language and the language of your spouse may be as different as Chinese from English.

إذا تحدثت مع شخص بلغةٍ يفهمها فذلك يحرّك عقله. وإذا تحدثت مع شخصٍ بلغته الأصلية فذلك يحرّك قلبه

The only thing that it has helped with when I do acting is that dance brings about a discipline. But the skills are totally different. You use your body to express to convey what you would like to communicate. Acting it is conveying a story through dialogue, the emotions are what is needed to come through.

If we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world.

For a woman, language spoken is an expression of what she is feeling. For a man, language spoken is an expression of what he is thinking. A woman says what is on her heart while a man says what is on his mind.

"Hey, I saw this old British movie, all the people spoke so different, you could hardly understand them. But everyone here speaks American as good as you and me. What's with that?"

But to understand English is one thing; to understand an Englishman who talks is another.

To act in a language that I’m not fully immersed in, not fully fluent in, it does pose a bit of a challenge. It does have some good in it as well; there are pros and cons actually. But I do believe if there is a point that I could just be acting like I would in Japanese, but in English, I’m sure that would be so much fun and exciting. One major challenge is that I can’t just do an ad-lib, I can’t do it off the cuff, so really that’s the difference. But it is exciting.

The first thing is that we don’t trust reality as much as you do. Reading English novels, I always adore the ability to write without fear about inner psychological things that are so delicate. In such a form you can develop a story in a very linear way, but we don’t have this patience. We feel that in every moment something must be wrong because our own story wasn’t linear. Another difference is that you are rooted in psychoanalysis while we’re still thinking in a mythical, religious way.

The structural closeness of languages to each other has often been thought to be an important factor in FLL (foreign language learning). If the L2 [the foreign language] is structurally similar to the L1 [the original language], it is claimed, learning should be easier than in cases where the L2 is very different. However, it is not possible to correlate linguistic difference and learning difficulty in any straightforward way, and even the basic task of quantifying linguistic difference proves to be highly complex, because of the many variables involved.

Now I know that speaking good English is not the measure of intelligent mind and sharp brain. English is only a language, like Yoruba and Igbo and Hausa. Nothing about it is so special, nothing about it makes anybody have sense.

Language may not determine the way we think, but it does influence the way we perceive and remember, and it affects the ease with which we perform mental tasks.

Speaking and writing in English carried with it the anxiety of being betrayed by one’s usage mistakes and lack of fluency; this was no doubt reinforced by the linking of academic success to facility with speech and writing. At the same time that I began learning English, my Mandarin slowed in development, because I wasn’t using it outside of the domestic sphere. To this day, even though I enrolled in a year of intensive Mandarin study in college, my Mandarin is quite stunted. I’ve lost most of the ability to read and write in it, sadly.

Talk English to me, Tommy.
Parlez francais avec moi, Nicole.
But the meanings are different — in French you can be heroic and gallant with dignity, and you know it. But in English you can't be heroic and gallant without being a little absurd, and you know that too.