Word: fluent
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These letters, whether to prospective employers, Harvard alums, or other contacts, should be in the language of the country unless you feel quite confident that the recipient is fluent in English. Be careful, however, not to overstep the bounds of your language ability by having someone else write the letter for you. If your language ability is up to it, don't hesitate to use the phone...
...proud people, but poverty has brought many of them low, poor in spirit as well as dinars. Their whole focus today is on basic survival. A government department head uses his car as a taxi after hours, while his wife takes in laundry. A young Iraqi woman fluent in four languages who once ran a hire-car firm now earns only $7 a month in a similar job. To keep going, she has had to sell so many possessions that she and her grandmother sleep on the floor and eat with their fingers from cooking utensils...
...educator, my personal experience learning foreign languages (I've studied French and Japanese) tells me that our educational system needs to stress not simply learning a foreign language but also mastery of that language: fluency, ideally, should be the goal. I believe students should be encouraged to become fluent in another language to travel to the country where that language is the official one and live there for eight weeks or longer, completely immersed in foreign food, newspapers and socialization with locals...
...carefully choosing a language, students will have a greater desire to become fluent in it. By fluent, I mean very comfortable with the language so that it sticks in their brains for decades, so that they become comfortable using it (like brushing their teeth), so that the language means more to them than just a series of high school or college courses they took years...
...once the students become fluent, I believe they should be encouraged to maintain their ability to speak that language, so that ability doesn't become rusty or--even worse--dissipate into nothingness. Unfortunately, I know a lot of people who have put an awful lot of hours into learning a foreign language but no longer remember much of that language at all; "parlez vous Francais?" is about all they...