Word: fluent
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Arika Okrent is fluent in English, Hungarian, American sign language and ... Klingon. (O.K., so she has only first-level certification in Star Trek-speak.) Okrent, a linguistics scholar, spent the better part of five years perusing library card catalogs and attending colorful conferences to learn about languages created by one person and, in some cases, adopted by thousands. Her new book, In the Land of Invented Languages, chronicles the scientists, idealists and eccentrics who tried - and failed - to create the perfect parlance from scratch. TIME spoke with Okrent about defending the cranks from the critics, ordering sandwiches in Esperanto...
...were tortured by the language, which you described as "an ungodly combination of Hindi, Arabic, Tlingit and Yiddish, and works like a mix of Japanese, Turkish and Mohawk." There weren't a whole bunch of people speaking completely fluently, but there were four or five people who were amazingly fluent. Which is not easy. I met several people who had been trying to pass the certification exam for years. The language is like a puzzle. I guess it's no weirder than wanting to be really good at chess...
...Judging by every metric, decriminalization in Portugal has been a resounding success," says Glenn Greenwald, an attorney, author and fluent Portuguese speaker, who conducted the research. "It has enabled the Portuguese government to manage and control the drug problem far better than virtually every other Western country does...
...each specific language. "They just throw it out there at the student," says Mark Kaiser, associate director of the Berkeley Language Center. "They fail to present language as a representation of that language's culture." Author and entrepreneur Tim Ferriss, a regular language acquisition blogger who has become fluent in Spanish, German, Chinese and Japanese, is quick to credit Rosetta Stone for engaging more people in language learning. However, Ferriss argues that by shunning grammar and exercises leveraging one's native language, Rosetta Stone slows the learning process. "There's a real benefit to having the right dose of grammatical...
Perhaps Obama's most dramatic departure from the recent past is his public presence: cool where George W. Bush seemed hot, fluent where Bush seemed tongue-tied, palliative rather than hortative. Bush would never admit a mistake, but Obama said the words plainly - "I made a mistake" - when his appointment of Tom Daschle as health-care czar tanked, one of the few significant setbacks during his time in office. (One senses that Obama's cool can quickly turn chilly. "He is not very sentimental," says an Obama aide. "If you're no longer useful, he'll cut you loose...