How U.S. Military Linguists Learn Languages Fast

American

military

linguists

are known for being among the

fast

est language

learn

ers in the world and they must be good because in any amount of intelligence gathering or hostile situations, knowing a language can save lives and in the US

military

linguists

are They train here in the language of defense. institute where they use techniques like iso immersion and shouting and doodling to teach foreign

languages

​​in incredibly intense programs with truly impressive results. Sergeant James called Tennessee. This is a serious operation, so I tracked down two retired soldiers to find out exactly how the language

learn

ing happened. in the military and what lessons you can learn from this for your own language goals.

Oh, and until the end, when I'll show you how you can take a mock entrance exam to see if you have the intellectual capacity to make it to the military. language program this is the foreign language center of the dli defense language institute and it is right here in monterey, california it is the largest, most efficient and effective foreign language institution in the US training over 350 000 students each year or almost 4,000 students in any Over time, there is now also a smaller Dli school in Washington DC that specializes in 65 less frequently taught

languages

, as well as an English training center in the air force base in Texas, but most of the action now takes place in California, to attend you must be a member of the armed forces or sponsored by a government agency, so for all you language dreamers , sorry, probably not going to happen, so who makes it to the dli?

Well, let's start with federal employees, who are the FBI and DEA border patrol coast guard. and so on, linguists in these government agencies do intelligence work and they are mainly jobs that are closer to home, investigating drug trafficking for example, if you watch television I'm sure you'll have at least an idea of ​​what These guys do it, except the military. It also trains interpreters that it sends around the world and these linguists work to translate highly classified documents and connect with troops and allied forces and of course on the front lines this ability to communicate can be crucial and that is where the military They come with soldiers who may have been sent to Afghanistan, for example, who have received intense language training in the Dli with native Afghan instructors.

Our students are initially service members of the Department of Defense. They come from all different branches of the military as citizen volunteers. Many of them have come recently. from basic training as military members come from all over the United States, very diverse, we have young service members, but we also have professionals returning for advanced language training as well as officers for advanced training, by the way, if you are new here . Welcome, my name is Ollie Richards and this channel aims to help you learn a new language and explore the world through the power of story. Do you want to see the inside of the school?

But I certainly do it for seven hours a day, five days a week, young man. Men and women in uniform work hard in very intensive language classes and when they finish the day they still need to do two or three hours of homework and somehow also spend an hour or two studying, but that's not all, after all, this It's the army and the soldiers now have training schedules and other tasks, as I'm sure you can guess, the school has a reputation for excellence after all, they have been successfully training soldiers in foreign languages ​​since 1941, so what ?

The languages ​​that soldiers can learn well here because it is the defense force. The list is very specific. 17 languages ​​and several dialects of those languages ​​are taught. Depending on the difficulty of the language, the courses can last from 26 to 64 weeks and I will tell you. what languages ​​take how much time in just a second i spoke to elle whose target language was the korean language program itself is 63 weeks long so in that time period we covered about three years of college level language so by the time we finish in During our 63 weeks, we are quite fluent in many different areas and moving very quickly with great intensity.

There is a saying among students that sums up the experience of drinking from a fire hose and, perhaps unlike many other language courses, the cultural one. This aspect of the language is taken very, very seriously. We teach the language at a very high level, close to the native level, and we teach it in a very short period of time. It is a very intense class, academically very difficult and part of that is learning about the culture. You can't really operate at high levels in a language unless you understand the culture. How can you understand humor read between the lines?

Understand current political issues. What are some of the tensions and challenges in that region politically? Geopolitically, it is essential to know. all of these things, so first things first, if you have been accepted into the military and you hope to be a linguist or your job requires you to be a linguist, you go to dli, you will be between 17 and 35 years old and most likely from the military, but you may also be from the navy or the air force, you may also be a green barrier sent here from fort bragg for additional language training, but before you approach Dli you must first take a proficiency test and it is called dlab, the Defense language aptitude battery.

If you pass, you will be placed in a language category based on how well you did. It could be an easier category like French or a more difficult category like Russian. Now this part is interesting even if you already know a language or have studied it at a decent level before or even speak a second language fluently there is no guarantee that you will pass the dlab test because the test itself does not test your ability in a specific area language, tests your brain's ability to learn a new language on the fly and is very smart, the test is based on a made up language, at least you can't cheat, talking about it with my recruiter at the time I took a second battery of tests called d-lab, which is the defense language aptitude battery and it tests your ability to learn languages, so it's all made up by language guys that they ask questions about and look for pattern recognition and whether you can solve them. grammatical structures and word recognition and that sort of thing and if you score high enough on that test then you qualify for the job of linguist.

Interesting, the logic of this will become clearer as you watch the rest of the video and as I mentioned above. You can also take this entrance test even as a civilian. I'll show you how you can do it later and the other thing civilians can do is subscribe to this channel. Look, it's much easier than the entrance. Press exactly one button and remember. why you are here why you are learning a language you are in the military you are not here simply to pass get your certificate on your diploma one day someone will depend on you and the intelligence you provide them to shape their operations you pass the entrance test you're on to what happens next well it's time for you to meet our second soldier jack it's not his real name and who has to remain anonymous for this video you're basically signing up for some kind of language related job it varies a bit From branch to branch you go through your initial basic training and then while you're in basic training they give you a dream sheet and tell you these are all the languages ​​that are currently taught, rank your top six and you don't know what language you get to the end of basic training, somewhere in the middle you fill out some documents, you explain the history of your language, what languages ​​you are interested in learning and they analyze them and then they analyze what the air force needs and they assign you, so You will, hopefully, be given one of your top three options, but like the missionaries in Utah, there is no guarantee that you will get the language you want.

You will be assigned the language based on two things: how well you did on your exam and what the current needs of the military are and those needs obviously change with world events, so you always have to look at them a few years in advance. Remember, this is not about you, active duty service members in particular, who don't get to choose. Jack expected to be Russian, but he was actually apart of Farsi, but in a stroke of luck he ended up being delayed and ended up getting into the Russian program. After all, what if she got what she wanted?

Yes, actually, before I joined, she had discovered Korean music and I had. I had really fallen in love with the sound of the language and everything so that was at the top of my list and I was lucky enough that they needed a Korean linguist and that's what they assigned me to a nice hill, now here are those Las language categories from before you will see here how the most familiar languages, such as French and Spanish, last 36 weeks, while these category 4 languages, such as Arabic or Chinese, take the full 64 weeks, almost the double the study time.

I have to tell you that it is 64 weeks. It's intense, I've learned eight languages, but the longest I've ever done an intensive language project was three months, which I'll link here and I have to say I was ready to stop after three months and it was nowhere near as intensive as they make it. these guys, as you'll find out in just a minute. Remember that most students arrive with minimal capabilities in their target language, but that changes very quickly, in fact, dli is an extremely intensive program for many of the young people who come. In fact, here sometimes even seasoned, careerist service members who come here for language training often say it's the hardest thing they've ever done in the military or as civilians before joining the military for up to a year and While students in DLIs eat, sleep, and read their chosen language, make no mistake, they can kick you out of the course if you're not up to par, but by now I bet you're wondering what kind of scary drill sergeant is instructing you. , Well, no.

If you are worried about your instructor being a civilian native speaker or a highly educated military language instructor or mli, then you have your mlis military language instructors like me, guys in uniform, who have been through the course and accomplished the mission, remember how difficult it was. learn a foreign language, if you can do it here you can overcome anything and there are about 1900 of these guys, where do you find them? We have language instructors from over 90 countries who come here to Monterey to support that world-class international training institute. The musicians on staff are even really impressive, but let's not pretend that everything is hunky-dory at the DLI.

The atmosphere in the classroom can become tense in the first few days. There is a lot of stress due to the

fast

pace of learning. Cultural clashes also occur even between students and teachers. different political views different perspectives on life is certainly not simple, well here is a good example. I had been in the course for about a month and my instructor told me to read this passage and it was in Russian, so I read it in Russian and she said everything. right, what does she say? So I switched to English because I was going to translate it, but she said no, no, no, say it in Russian, explain your idea in Russian and I was like, "Okay, great, I'm trying to piece something together." stuff, my grammar is horrible and stuff, I start talking and the moment I started talking she started putting her head in her hands on her desk and rubbing her face and I finished and she said that was absolute, then I said : sorry, I mean.

I'm 19 years old and I've never learned a language before, so let's find out more about what really happens inside the classroom, including that shouting and scribbling I mentioned before, no matter what language you're learning, it's going to be incredibly fast paced. and the hard classes are Monday through Friday and almost all day, so since we were military, our day always started very early in the morning and we had morning training where we could do uniform inspections, we had announcements that kind of thing and then we were in the classrooms around 7:30 8 o'clock and we had a total of six hours of language learning throughout the day.

Luckily you get a 10 minute break every hour and finish at 3:30 in the afternoon, but there's still no way to relax, in fact it's not even half of what the day seems like, just wait and see what happens Another interesting thing: depending on your language, there may also be many different ranks in your class, so if you are a private, you could easily have a captain or even a sergeant sitting next to you, which has to be fun, no matter the mix of different branches, all learning together in the same room. I wonder what this was like.

It was always interesting to navigate the different militaries.In different cultures there was an air force marine army and we had a navy most of the time and each branch has different standards and you know different things that they have to do during the week to fulfill their military purpose, so it was interesting to see We all try to balance that. with learning the language, so the first day, the first class, the first lesson, what is it like? If it were your first day, the teacher comes in, we are all nervous, we are sitting in the class and I have never spoken to a Russian person before the teacher came in talking.

Russian and I say I have no idea what you're saying, I don't know what to do, but initially they switched to English because they know you don't understand anything, you go over the alphabet, you practice your writing and they teach you all the cursive and all that after two days they say okay we bless you with the alphabet and make the symbol craft now let's start learning things we were expected to know everything now so we start learning words and grammar but it depends if you have Arabic you spend more time on it They call sound and writing, it's an initial three week course where you go over the Arabic alphabet, yes, for languages ​​with a different script, like Arabic, they will spend up to a month on the basic alphabet and sounds before even learning. to vocabulary, if you understood that, the sound and Jackson's script, this is a daily session before classes where the students are introduced to the most basic vocabulary so that they get used to what the script actually looks like, apparently this class is on the nickname, shout and scribble, you can I'll leave it to your imagination to figure out why, but the idea is to set the soldiers up for success in the challenging weeks ahead because at some point even the class instructions will all be in Arabic and we'll see . some examples of what real classroom activities look like in just a second, okay, so an important question from me at this point: what percentage of the time are you just hearing the target language versus actually being taught in English?

Because if you remember from my video at the Mormon missionary training center those guys have a very strict no English rule from the beginning, most of the instruction was kind of a mix of English and Korean when we started, there was a lot more English , but as we learned the language we became more Korean, all our teachers spoke in Korean and then explained in English again, so the grammar fits every day, maybe we had a paragraph or a small dialogue in Korean that we were studying and there would be new pieces. of grammar, new verb endings, new ways of saying the things that are talked about in that paragraph and we would learn from that and all the vocabulary of that day would be in that paragraph, so they would teach from these paragraphs every day to the principle. talk to us a little bit of English just to make sure that we understand these grammatical concepts, they would explain the concepts in English and then they would switch to Russian and say, let me show you what this looks like in real Russian so that the instruction aspect would be in English so make sure you understand it and then all the practice and application would switch to Russian, but then we would do things that we would be good at, let's wait a step back, the course itself was divided into three semesters and in each semester you would have a main topic, so the first semester of Russian we did history, the second semester we did geography and the third semester was culture, so take the history class, the whole lesson was in Russian and we didn't really understand anything.

I learned to say the pencil is on the desk and the teacher started talking to us about Soviet history and they know you don't understand most of what is being said but it would help you get familiar with the language that you have workbooks with. text. in front of you, so you try to match what you're hearing with what you're reading, yeah, having the context for that would obviously be helpful to know the topic. I like that, as you progress through the course, the professors talk less and less. english and eventually no english there will also be an hour during the day with a military instructor talking about specific military things.

I imagine the vocabulary in general will be quite specific in the military. I wonder if there are any limitations on what is taught. For example, we didn't talk much, we didn't learn many religious words, but we did learn many political words. The language program itself is 63 weeks long, so in that period we covered about three years of university level language, so when we finished our 63 weeks, we were quite fluent in many different areas, politics, media, there are many things we learned that were specific to our job, but not as specific as You would think that at Dli we had a second school in Texas where we did more work-related language and that's obviously the Air Force school in Texas.

I think they divide the day's lessons into one hour blocks of reading, listening and speaking, so how are these lessons done? At work we would have an hour with a teacher who would teach us about a specific grammar point and then the next hour would be like in English we have Latin roots, in Korean there are Chinese roots, it's been all of our learning about specific roots. so that we can expand and have an easier time recognizing the words, okay, so this starts with simple sentences and important words, eventually talking more and more about word roots, conjugations, noun declensions, etc., when We learned Korean, we started with basic words and phrases like hello, how are you?

I'm glad to see you again and that kind of stuff and then I built on that and learned the parts of grammar later and kept adding more vocabulary to what we already had and learning whole sentences instead of individual words and phrases, you can learn grammar. much better learning the whole and then breaking it down obviously I completely agree that starting with complete sentences is the best way to learn a typical exercise given to them at this stage is something like this here is the root word now here is a sentence find out which form of this word is correct for the sentence and in a language like Arabic it is very important to choose the correct prefixes and suffixes or the meaning in a military context at least very often changes to something quite different and I certainly don't want to say something wrong In the field, the method is now known to make heavy use of structured repetition, so if students are given 25 new words to learn for a test, those words will appear all day in grammar lessons. . and again and again and it goes on constantly with lots of reinforcement.

Now there is something that you won't find in many other language schools and that is that the dialects of a language are great and are taught from the beginning in the classroom, so if you are learning Arabic for example, you will get an hour or two of Arabic fundamental modern standard every day, for example, but then they will train you in various dialects of Arabic. Many soldiers these days are learning the dialect first in the field and then learning Standard Arabic in school and learning these dialects is very important. Image that you are supporting ground operations and receive intelligence that your unit is about to be ambushed.

You won't have time to use a dictionary on the Internet or run it through an entire chain of command to control your work, it's just up to you, confidence in your abilities is of course in good hands, all these instructors are bilingual and they know how to explain even the most difficult grammar or idiomatic expressions. For those dialects, let's explore the structure and objectives of the program in the DLI. There are four levels to achieve fluency as a native speaker, although you can go even higher if you wish, but to pass and graduate you only have to reach level two, which means being able to understand the essence of a conversation or accurately select the facts from a newscast, for example, who, what, when, where, why, at level three, your understanding has become much more intuitive and you can grasp someone's intention and motive, etc.

It's up to you whether you reach that level or not, but certain jobs will require that level of understanding, like CIA for example, so what is the primary skill that most people in the program focus on? It's a lot of oral practice. Yes. There was a lot of oral practice in class, our tests were always listening, reading and speaking, the goal was always to improve speaking along with the other skills, but our final test at the end of the course focused more on listening and reading than speaking , and this obviously makes sense to me because their future job will involve listening primarily in Korean, but the guys will be operating in attached military capacities for example, they will naturally need a lot more oral practice to prepare, so it really depends on what they are going to do. do.

I'm doing in the field and then as you go you do more and more comprehension work, looking for meaning in texts, making inferences based on the things that are said and this type of work will be familiar to my students in my story learning because working on comprehension and discovering language from a context is the main priority when using story in our case, but I am interested to see how they balance speaking and comprehension in the dli because I can see how to learn to say things can be absolutely critical in the field from the At first you may imagine the need to give very clear orders in another language, but being able to understand what is going on reads a difficult situation along with the cultural nuances.

I mean, those are the really hard, really important things, after which you can't win hearts and minds. all if you don't understand how hearts and minds work, then the next question is what your self-study time is like. So for self-study, we had a lot of homework to do, we had 20 to 80 new vocabulary. words to memorize each night, usually longer over the weekend, we had some kind of recording we had to make of ourselves speaking in the language, we often had transcription homework where we would listen to a recording and then transcribe what we heard , I think there were other smaller types that were less common, but those were the big three and a lot of the teachers recommended that I also watch the news in Korean, watch dramas, TV shows and listen to music and that kind of thing, and to me in particular, since I was already interested.

In music, that's what I did a lot sometimes instead of homework and I have to do it early in the morning. I spent a lot of time listening to the sounds of natural speakers and I have tons and tons of Korean books. read or I'm trying to read ah reading books in Korean of course I strongly approve, although I have no idea if they use this in the dli, probably not, but there is actually a huge library of free military training resources to which you have open access and We'll get to that a little later, but first you'll love this.

Check this out on the dli. They have what they call an isolation immersion facility or iso immersion, where students can live up to three days sometimes. up to five days is basically a chance to interact in a more realistic environment. This is great. There are kitchens, bedrooms and things like that. You will be isolated in a world where only your new language is understood and you will have to practice. Real world situations, like haggling at a market for food for whatever you need or going through customs, making hotel reservations over the phone, pretty good for Russian, the teachers would set up scenarios like one time that made it seem like we were going through a airport.

I had to go through that speaking Russian thing, but there was some kind of variable that was thrown in. The security guard was getting angry because we were missing some documents or something. They build small stages. It's like many days of talks to practice. using the language, so even if you can't travel to those countries, they still create those kinds of opportunities and all of this is designed to help you appreciate the culture, obviously there are cooking days wearing traditional clothing, storytelling days where you listen about legendary warriors and heroes, it is truly something extraordinary, generally each graduating class goes through three of these immersive events during their course.

Look, maybe that's what we've been missing all along. We should dress up and cook exotic food. I think that's the secret, but seriously, going the extra mile like this really does wonders for not only absorbing the language but also understanding the culture, because remember some of these recruits are only 17 years old and have never left school. home, that is, when I remember it. to what I was like when I was 17 and when I didn't know anything at 17 I certainly didn't know anything about the world, so it's not just about the language, there's a lot more that you need to prepare these kids for and I'm pretty sure that That's what the military had in mind whenThey introduced this next feature, the simulations now imagine that you have been deployed and your task is to go out and hire interpreters to help troops in the field or perhaps negotiate at a border crossing, that's what the simulations are designed for.

To prepare for this, here is a role-playing scene in a simulated village. See if you can figure out what's going on. Those serious faces were no joke. They take it very seriously. It is not like this? I'm curious how you think you'd follow through with this type of training in your classes, let me know in the comments and by the way, I know we have military watching this channel, so if there's anything here that you think I've misunderstood or I have misrepresented Either way, let me know in the comments for some languages. You can even take an immersion trip abroad.

In fact, 15 of the students are selected for an overseas trip of some kind, which will be extremely motivating. Going to Korea was always a great motivation. For me and I were able to go in the middle of the training, they often send students for six weeks to study at one of the universities there as an exchange program and that was a really cool experience and made me even more excited about completing the course. and going back to jack's experience, about halfway through the course there was a small group of us who went on a language exchange to latvia and we were walking there not hearing english anywhere like the first time i went to a restaurant communicating a idea and making them understand was like wow, we actually know what's going on before, that you're constantly doing grammar and exercises, you have all these worksheets and homework and all that, so you're like in this little box all the time and so on. on our first opportunity to go out and use the language we thought this is great, not bad, it was a good motivation to keep going and this language exchange lasted five or six months, how was it?

Soldiers do it. It takes more than five months to feel really comfortable, but I could move. I could travel, take a bus, go to restaurants, have basic conversations, you know, but yeah, it was a good motivation to keep going. I'll quickly show you the schedule of a typical day at the dli just to get an overview of what it's like and a track here, if you think the only job after class is healthy running around the track in combat boots, well first you'd be wrong . everyone remember this is military appropriate, meaning all military rules apply at 5:30 a.m. or should it be oh 5:30 I don't know anyway you wake up you make your bed yeah, like that, then you have to do the housework, take out the trash and everything before breakfast you have to be in the parking lot at 7am. for the party and the training and when the training ends you have 25 minutes before classes and then you continue until 3:30 in the afternoon with a break for lunch, of course, you have it and at 3 30 when the classes of the day, you have to quickly put on your pt uniform and hurry to reach the right place for an hour of physical training.

Then, of course, it's dinner time. 7 p.m. m. It is mandatory study hall time. You can go to the library. if you want, but otherwise, you're in your room with the door open studying, yeah, so it's probably a good time to finish your homework too. It may be 9 p.m. when study time is over, but then you have to go iron your uniform and clean your boots because at 9:45 there is bed-check training and if you think you can sleep after that, there's no chance it's time to study again. I bet most of you are now appreciating the absolute luxury of learning a language from your living room anyway where we were curfew is 10pm. but at this hour I have no doubt that these boys and girls are passing out, but only if they do their homework, of course, and then sleep and repeat, and I bet they're looking forward to Saturdays because wait, they have the ends Right, guys, on the weekends people are usually pretty good at trying to blow off some steam, go travel somewhere, do something good, but you also have this cloud over you at all times, like you might be studying. my verbs or something like that you feel guilty for not doing your homework because that's all you do all year.

I'm all for letting off steam and not just studying verbs on the weekend, let me tell you, but before you decide this is definitely not for you. Let me tell you about a really fun aspect of training at Dli: students will prepare for an annual open house in May, which is appropriately called language day. Several thousand visitors come to this event and you may even have attended one. In which case I want to hear it all in the comments. I think it looks absolutely amazing. I would also have a language day. Can we have a language day to learn stories?

How would it work? I have no idea now after all the exhausting. work pt struggles to bond the last day comes the day when it all comes down to two words pass or fail and the nerves are pretty high obviously especially the speaking part the stress of that oh the nerves were pretty high , especially the speaking one, because you go You walk into this room and two native Russian speakers are sitting there with a microphone and you start talking. Know? What advice can our soldiers offer to someone who is about to go to Dli? Find something about the language that you like and that excites you. about that it will help you get through learning the language because it is very difficult and the language program is meant to put in a lot of effort and many students return or are abandoned and sent to another job so if you find something that you can love the language or your destination country, that will really help you, it's definitely true for any language learning mission and Jack, you're going to be there for a while so have fun, the most important thing you can do is and this is what I tell the people even now. like when we add a new person to our squad who just finished training, I appreciate where you are because, first of all, there are many people who would love the opportunity to go to Dli and learn a language, and also, You're getting paid to learn a language, so appreciate being there.

You know it's something incredible. The fact that when you are in class there is a native speaker who personally teaches you this language. It's a unique opportunity, so enjoy it, think about the greatness. is that you are there right now, the fact that he is linked to our career adds a bit of pressure, but ultimately, you are studying a way to explore new aspects of the world, relax, enjoy it and be grateful. I like that now. I know a lot of people watching this will say, man, I'll do it. I would gladly pay whatever it takes to be able to take this incredible intensive training, so as promised, here are two resources you'll love, straight from the defense language institute itself, first and foremost.

You have shine, this is an online global language support system and dli recruits can use it to listen to the weather forecast in Honduras, review a Spanish accent library, listen to recordings of Albanian conversations, it's an amazing resource, the best of all. You can take advantage of this online, the link is in the description below, but there is more because remember the dlab test that I told you about before, the one for the invented language, the entrance exam, well, if you want to experiment, you can buy a practice d. -Lab test directly from Amazon again, link in description, but remember the US military isn't the only ones teaching languages ​​intensively like this.

Mormon missionaries are also doing amazing things in Utah and if you click on this video you can see exactly what they are all about. is