Condi does not speak fluent Russian and cannot converse in the various mother tongues of the provinces. OK? This was proven when she went there and needed closed captions.
Sorry Mr. Brokaw, you have been drinking the Kool-Aid.
Don’t go to wiki, don’t go to yahoo!answers, don’t go to ASK.com…they are wrong and all come from the same PR source.
She can read, she passed her exams at UoD, but she cannot speak fluently.
Sorry Tom, sorry Chris, sorry Rachel you MSNBC clowns are wrong.
It also came out during the Republican primaries that Jon Huntsman is not a fluent speaker of Mandarin Chinese. This stuff never seems to get corrected because the factoid sounds impressive (American who speaks multiple languages = supergenius) and because the journalists who cover the people in question don’t speak the languages themselves, so they can’t evaluate the claim. You don’t need to speak a language fluently to be a diplomat.
Cite for any of this? Given her academic background, I’d be surprised it she wasn’t at least conversant in Russian and Czech. Then again, I also find myself wondering how someone with a PhD from Denver ever got a tenure-track gig at Stanford. In History, this would be unthinkable. Are things different in Poli Sci?
He spoke some very convincing Mandarin on Cobert, tonight. I mean, I don’t speak it, but he really sounded like he knew his stuff, with the whole melodic lilt to it and everything.
Conversant doesn’t necessarily mean fluent, and a fair number of (non-native speaking) academics trained in an age when it was much more difficult to get in-country language experience in the Soviet Union weren’t fluent. My department chair in grad school was a highly regarded Russian historian, but his speaking ability in Russian was pretty awful. He probably just didn’t get enough speaking practice early on in his education/career. I’m sure he could read just fine, though.
Yes. This is an interesting subject among linguisticians.
The comprehension of written language is apparently handled by a different subprocess than is the comprehension of spoken language. Not only different parts of the cortex, but also different methods of encoding.