| Term used by U.S. government language instructors to refer to a "working command" of a foreign language. LWP entails being able to engage in ordinary conversation in the language, and read newspapers and other periodical literature. Understanding specialized conversation and advanced literature is outside the scope of LWP.
In full-time training, it takes government students about three months to achieve LWP in Romance languages such as Spanish and French. For other Indo-European languages such as Russian, it can take up to six: for unrelated languages such as Arabic and Mandarin, it takes about a year. | 
