Word: fluent
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Just absorbing hundreds of thousands of immigrants, all at once, would be a tough enough task for the overburdened overlapping local governments. (For instance, of L.A.'s 550,000 schoolchildren, 117,000 speak one of 104 languages better than they do English?including 35 kids fluent only in Gujarati, a language of western India.) But another daunting array of urban problems will not wait. L.A. is aging. "Streets are breaking up. Water mains are breaking up. Bridges are crumbling," says Harvey Perloff, dean of U.C.L.A.'s school of architecture and urban planning. "The day of reckoning is going to happen...
...opened his Hoban Restaurant on Western Avenue a decade ago, and profits have increased tenfold. Yet, after 14 years in L.A., he speaks barely passable English. Yum has not refused to become fluent. He is just too busy. "Money is our first priority," he says. "We have to work first, and then we have time to learn the language. Or our children will...
...possible. In a report last month by a Twentieth Century Fund task force, members who were disillusioned with the performance of elaborate bilingual programs urged diversion of federal funds to the teaching of English. The panel held: "Schoolchildren will never swim in the American mainstream unless they are fluent in English...
...earned him the ambassadorship to Brazil in July 1981, amid a chorus of skeptical murmurs. But Motley's brand of eager and enterprising informality was well suited to his birthplace. He not only silenced his detractors but also charmed an impressive number of high-level Brazilians, all in fluent Portuguese. Sometimes driving out to the country in his pickup for drinks with Brazil's President João Baptista Figueiredo, he was instrumental in arranging state visits between Figueiredo and Reagan...
Mosher, who speaks fluent Cantonese, won a coveted research grant to go to China in 1979 to study a community. The Chinese allowed him the unusual opportunity of choosing where to do his field work. He picked the Starwood Brigade, the ancestral village of his Hong Kong-born wife Maggie So, from whom he is now divorced. Officials even traveled from Peking to tell Brigade leaders to cooperate with Mosher. During the course of his nine-month stay, Mosher put together the most detailed firsthand account of village life in contemporary China by a Western scholar...