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Education Quote by Connie Francis

"I just remembered songs my grandmother taught me, and songs that I learned for the recordings. But, then I learned to speak Italian. When I was there, I hired a professor who stayed with me 24 hours a day. She wouldn't let me speak a word of English"

About this Quote

Connie Francis is describing a kind of pop-star work ethic that rarely gets romanticized: not inspiration, but submission. She starts with the comfortable mythology of heritage - songs from her grandmother, a family pipeline into tradition - and then immediately punctures it with the unglamorous reality of the job. For the recordings, she learns what she has to learn. For Italy, she does something more radical: she gives up the linguistic home base that made her famous.

The detail that lands is logistical, almost comic in its severity: a professor on a 24-hour leash, an English ban enforced like a detox. It reads less like language study than method acting for international stardom. Francis is signaling seriousness to an audience that might assume American performers simply export themselves unchanged. The subtext is respect, but also strategy. Learning Italian isn't just about pronunciation; it's about trust, about removing the thin film of American distance that can make a translated performance feel like karaoke.

There’s a quiet power in how she frames it: not as a virtue statement, not as a triumph, but as a memory of discipline. The insistence on total immersion hints at the stakes of her era, when global fame depended on physically going places, cutting new versions of hits, and meeting foreign listeners on their turf. Francis doesn’t sell authenticity as a vibe. She treats it as labor, enforced minute by minute.

Quote Details

TopicMusic
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Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Francis, Connie. (2026, January 15). I just remembered songs my grandmother taught me, and songs that I learned for the recordings. But, then I learned to speak Italian. When I was there, I hired a professor who stayed with me 24 hours a day. She wouldn't let me speak a word of English. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-just-remembered-songs-my-grandmother-taught-me-170763/

Chicago Style
Francis, Connie. "I just remembered songs my grandmother taught me, and songs that I learned for the recordings. But, then I learned to speak Italian. When I was there, I hired a professor who stayed with me 24 hours a day. She wouldn't let me speak a word of English." FixQuotes. January 15, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-just-remembered-songs-my-grandmother-taught-me-170763/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"I just remembered songs my grandmother taught me, and songs that I learned for the recordings. But, then I learned to speak Italian. When I was there, I hired a professor who stayed with me 24 hours a day. She wouldn't let me speak a word of English." FixQuotes, 15 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-just-remembered-songs-my-grandmother-taught-me-170763/. Accessed 6 Feb. 2026.

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I learned Italian; my teacher would not let me speak English
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Connie Francis (born December 12, 1938) is a Musician from USA.

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