Word: strumpen
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...businessmen are learning that money talks better overseas if it speaks the local language. The man who has done the most to teach them that fact of life-and the languages-is President Robert Strumpen-Darrie, 51, of Berlitz Schools of America. Berlitz has profited greatly from the expansion of U.S. companies abroad; since 1952, the number of executives taking company-paid language courses at Berlitz has jumped from 300 to 3,500. And President Strumpen-Darrie is convinced that every syllable is worth its rather high cost. "We have found," he says, "that an executive who speaks the language...
With U.S. businessmen buying and selling in increasingly remote parts of the world, Berlitz now teaches 46 living languages from Afrikaans to Urdu. President Strumpen-Darrie (who gets by in half a dozen languages) and 48-year-old Vice President Charles Berlitz (15 languages fluently, another 15 passably) insist that non-European tongues are usually no tougher than European ones, and that almost anyone can gain a rough working knowledge after 30 hours of instruction and a good fluency (a 3,000-word vocabulary) after 120 hours. The price: $3 for group lessons, $6 for individual sessions. For Berlitz, this...
...give-the conversational skill to haggle with a foreign hackie, wrangle with a waiter, or, as has been necessary more than once, the ability to ask directions to the U.S. embassy in the country to which the customer has just been appointed ambassador. Last week in Manhattan, President Robert Strumpen-Darrie (some twelve languages) and Vice President Charles Berlitz (23 languages) of the Berlitz Schools of Languages, spoke happily of statistics: last year the firm grossed an estimated $10 million from teach-yourself texts and records and from students in 32 language centers in the U.S. and its possessions...
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