Linda Newman

About Me

Hi Everyone! Bonjour/Buon Giorno/Guten Tag/Dobri Dyen/Ni Hao!

I “accidentally” found this site, and I’m looking forward to meeting many of you who also are walking the path towards acquiring and mastering new language skills.

I am a native of Montreal, Quebec, Canada, but I have been a permanent resident of the U.S. (Jefferson City, MO) since July/05. I am fluent in French, having lived my whole life in Quebec, where the official language is French. I also grew up with an Italian grandmother in the house, so I understand Italian well, but because I spoke to my grandmother mostly in French over the years, my grasp of the spoken language is somewhat limited.

I studied German, Russian, and Spanish for a couple of years in college; however, I lost interest in Spanish when my Castilian-speaking professor kept chastising me for mixing Italian in with Spanish on my assignments! lol

I hope to improve my Italian conversational skills, and possibly reacquaint myself with German and Russian. I may also wish to inquire about Mandarin tutoring, since I began to learn some Mandarin through audio CDs a while ago.

Meanwhile, please feel free to leave me a message, or you may contact me through Skype: linda_newman or
Yahoo! Messenger: linrose8

QUOTES:

Language is the dress of thought. ~Samuel Johnson 1709-1784

Language is called the garment of thought: however, it should rather be, language is the flesh-garment, the body, of thought. ~Thomas Carlyle 1795-1881

Learn a new language and get a new soul. ~Czech Proverb

A different language is a different vision of life. ~Federico Fellini

Language is the means of getting an idea from my brain into yours without surgery. ~Mark Amidon

Language forces us to perceive the world as man presents it to us. ~Julia Penelope

English is a funny language; that explains why we park our car on the driveway and drive our car on the parkway. ~Author Unknown

I personally believe we developed language because of our deep inner need to complain. ~Jane Wagner

Euphemisms are unpleasant truths wearing diplomatic cologne. ~Quentin Crisp

In certain trying circumstances, urgent circumstances, desperate circumstances, profanity furnishes a relief denied even to prayer. ~Mark Twain

At no time is freedom of speech more precious than when a man hits his thumb with a hammer. ~Marshall Lumsden

What words say does not last. The words last. Because words are always the same, and what they say is never the same. ~Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin

I like the word “indolence.” It makes my laziness seem classy. ~Bern Williams

Thanks to words, we have been able to rise above the brutes; and thanks to words, we have often sunk to the level of the demons. ~Aldous Huxley

He who does not know foreign languages does not know anything about his own. ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kunst and Alterthum

Words, like Nature, half reveal
And half conceal the Soul within.
~Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Im memoriam A.H.H.,” 1850

Language is by its very nature a communal thing; that is, it expresses never the exact thing but a compromise – that which is common to you, me, and everybody. ~Thomas Earnest Hulme, Speculations, 1923

The existing phrasebooks are inadequate. They are well enough as far as they go, but when you fall down and skin your leg they don’t tell you what to say. ~Mark Twain

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. ~George Orwell

The word “good” has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man. ~G.K. Chesterton

And last, but not least ~

Be yourself. No one is better qualified. ~ Anonymous

À bientôt…Ciao :-)