Word: french
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...only person who thinks so. Earlier this month, French President Nicolas Sarkozy unveiled an "emergency plan" for teaching foreign languages in the nation's schools with the lofty objective that "all our high school students must become bilingual, and some should be trilingual." Why the panic? Because as Sarkozy noted, a nation that spends 5.8% of its annual GDP on education - the fifth-highest percentage in the world - simply must do better than its current rank of 69th among 109 countries on the standardized Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL). To that end, Sarkozy has proposed exposing students...
...faces look a little nervous and the words are spoken a bit timidly - all rather normal for a group of French students learning to speak English. But the hesitant responses aren't coming in a classroom where foreign-language instruction is another obligatory grind in a long day of courses. Instead, these 18-to-25-year-olds are paying up to $6,000 annually to master a language they all took for six years in high school before earning their baccalaureate degrees and entering the job market...
With “Tabloid” and “Musicvision,” the four lifelong friends that comprise Phoenix give us entrée into the most profound and lasting of their “Aha!” moments, recalling a line from that most French of films, “Jules and Jim.” On the friendship of the two protagonists, the film’s narrator comments, “Each taught the other his language and culture... They shared their poetry and translated them together...
...trial is far from certain. Paris prosecutor Jean-Claude Marin has already advised that the charges be dropped as groundless. Under French law, he now has several weeks to petition an appeals court to overturn Simeoni's ruling - a move he looks certain to make since he previously told the judge he believed the evidence against Chirac was too weak to take to trial...
...collective shrugging in France at the charges? Part of the reason may be that other illegal political funding schemes were commonplace in France from the 1970s to the early 1990s when a series of laws were passed to crack down on the practice. The French also tend to be more scornful of public officials who use corruption to enrich themselves personally, which Chirac isn't accused of doing in this case...