How U.S. Military Linguists Learn Languages Fast

u. s military linguists are known for being among the fastest language learners in the world and they need to be good because in any number of intelligence gathering or hostile situations knowing a language can save lives and in the u. s military linguists get trained here at the defense language institute where they use techniques like iso immersion and scream and scribble to teach foreign languages in incredibly intense programs with some seriously impressive results sergeant james call to tennessee [Music] this is a serious operation so i tracked down two retired soldiers to find out exactly how language learning happened in the military and what lessons you can steal from this for your own language goals oh and say to the end when i'll show you how you can take a mock entrance exam to see whether you have the brain power to make it onto a military language program this is the dli the defense language institute foreign language center and it's right here in monterrey california it is the biggest most efficient and effective foreign language institution in the u.

s that trains more than 350 000 students each year or nearly 4 000 students at any given time now there is also a smaller dli school in washington dc that specializes in 65 less commonly taught languages as well as an english training center at the air force base in texas but most of the action takes place in california now to attend you must be a member of the armed forces or be sponsored by a government agency so to all of you language dreamers out there sorry it probably ain't gonna happen so who makes it to the dli well let's start with federal employees that's fbi dea border patrol coast guard and so on linguists in these government agencies do intelligence jobs and they're mainly jobs that are closer to home investigating drug trafficking for example if you watch tv i'm sure you will have at least some idea of what these guys do but the military also trains interpreters that it sends all over the world and these linguists work to translate highly classified documents and connect with troops and allied forces and of course on the front line this ability to communicate can be crucial and that's where the armed forces come in soldiers who may have been deployed to afghanistan for example would have gotten intense language training at the dli with native afghan instructors our students initially are department of defense service members they come from all the different branches of the military as volunteer citizens a lot of them have recently come from basic training as military members they come from throughout the united states very diverse we have young service members but we've also got careerists who return back for advanced language training as well as officers for advanced training by the way if you're new here welcome my name is ollie richards and this channel is all about helping you learn a new language and explore the world through the power of story now do you want to see inside the school but i certainly do for seven hours a day five days a week young men and women in uniform are hard at work in very intensive language classes and when they knock off at the end of the day they still need to get through two or three hours of homework and somehow also fit in an hour or two of study time but that's not all this is the military after all and soldiers have pt schedules and other duties now as i'm sure you can guess the school has a reputation for excellence after all they've been successfully training soldiers in foreign languages since 1941 [Music] uh so what languages can soldiers learn here well because it's the defense force the list is very specific 17 languages and several dialects of those languages are taught and depending on the difficulty of the language the courses can last anything from 26 to 64 weeks and i'll tell you which languages take how long in just a second i spoke to elle whose target language was korean language program itself is 63 weeks long and so we in that time frame we cover about three years of college level language so by the time we're done in our 63 weeks then we're pretty fluent in a lot of different areas and it moves by really fast at great intensity there's a saying among students that sums up the experience drinking from a fire hose and perhaps unlike a lot of other language courses the cultural aspect of the language is taken very very seriously we teach language to a very high proficiency level near native proficiency and we teach it in a very short period of time it's very intense class very difficult academically and part of that is to learn about the culture because you really can't operate at high levels in a language unless you understand the culture how can you understand the humor read between the lines understand current political affairs what are the some of the tensions and challenges in that region politically uh geopolitically it's essential to know all these things so first things first if you've been accepted into the military and hope to be a linguist or your job requires you to be a linguist you go to the dli you'll be between the ages of 17 and 35 and most likely from the army but you may also be from the navy marine corps or air force you may perhaps also be a green barrier sent here from fort bragg for additional language training but before you get anywhere near the dli you first have to take a proficiency test and it's called the dlab the defense language aptitude battery if you pass you'll be put 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 bit is interesting even if you already know a language or you've studied it to a decent level before or even you're fluent in a second language there's no guarantee that you'll pass the dlab test why because the test itself doesn't test your ability in a specific language it tests your brain's ability to learn a new language on the fly and it's very clever the test is based on a made-up language at least you can't cheat talking it over with my recruiter at the time i took a second battery of tests called the d-lab which is the defense language aptitude battery and that tests your ability to learn languages so it's all made up language type things that they're asking questions about and they're looking for pattern recognition and whether you can work out grammar structures and word recognition and that sort of thing and if you have a high enough score in that test then you qualify for the linguist job interesting right the logic of this will become clearer as you watch the rest of the video and as i mentioned earlier you can take this entrance test too even as a civilian i'll show you how you can do that later and the other thing that civilians can do is subscribe to this channel see it's quite a bit easier than the entrance exactly click one button and remember why you're here why you're learning a language you're in the military you're not here to just pass get your certificate in your diploma one day someone's gonna be relying on you and the intelligence you provide to shape their operations so you pass the entry test you're in what happens next well it's time you met our second soldier jack not his real name and who has to remain anonymous for this video you basically sign up for some kind of language related job it varies a little bit 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 they say these are all the languages currently being taught rank your top six and you don't find out what language you get until the end of basic training sometime in the middle you fill out some paperwork you explain your language history what languages you are interested in learning and they look at those and then they look at what the air force needs and they assign you so hopefully you will be given one of your top three choices but just like the missionaries in utah there is no guarantee that you'll get the language that you want you'll be assigned the language based on two things how well you did on your test and what the army's current needs are and those needs obviously change with world events so they always have to be looked at a few years ahead remember this is not about you active service members in particular that don't get to choose jack was hoping to get russian but he was actually aside farsi but in a lucky break he actually ended up suffering a delay and he ended up getting on the russian program after all how about l did she get what she wanted yes actually um before joining i had discovered um korean music and i had really fallen in love with the sound of the language and everything and so that was on the top of my list and i was just lucky enough that they needed a korean linguist and so that's what i was assigned to nice one hill now here are those language categories from earlier you'll see here how more familiar languages like french and spanish are 36 weeks in length while these category 4 languages like arabic or chinese take the whole 64 weeks almost double the study time i've got to tell you 64 weeks is intense i've learned eight languages but the longest i've ever done an intensive language project for was three months which i'll link to up here and i have to say i was ready to stop after three months and it was nowhere near as intensive as well these guys do as you'll find out in just a minute now remember most students arrive with only minimal capabilities in their target language but that changes very fast indeed dli is an extremely intensive program a lot of the young people coming through here in fact sometimes even experienced service members careerists who come through here for language training will often say it's the hardest thing they've done in the military or as a civilian before they join the military for up to a year and a half the students at the dli eat sleep and read their chosen language and make no mistake you can get kicked off the course if you don't measure up but by now i bet you're wondering what kind of frightening drill sergeant teacher will be instructing you right well not to worry your instructor will be either 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 been through the course and we've done the mission remember how hard it was to learn a foreign language if you can make it here you can make it through anything and there are about 1900 of these guys where do they find them we have linguists instructors from over 90 countries that come here to monterey to support that training institute [Music] first class international staff musicians even it's really impressive but let's not pretend that it is all smooth sailing at the dli the atmosphere in the classroom can get tense in the early days it's high stress with the fast pace of learning cultural clashes happen as well even between students and teachers different political views different outlooks on life it certainly isn't straightforward well here's a good example of it i was like a month into the course and my instructor said read this passage and it was in russian so i read it in russian and she said all right what is it saying so i swapped to english because i was going to translate it but she said no no no no say it in russian explain your idea in russian and i was like frick all right cool and i'm trying to piece together some things my grammar's awful and so on i start speaking and the moment i started talking she started putting her head down in her hands on her desk and rubbing her face and i finished and she said that was absolute then i said i'm sorry i mean i'm 19 and i've never learned a language before so let's find out more about what actually goes on inside the classroom including that scream and scribble that i mentioned earlier no matter what language you are learning it is going to be insanely fast paced and difficult classes are monday to friday and pretty much all day long so because we were military then our day always started really early in the morning and we'd have morning formation where we could do uniform inspections we have announcements that sort of thing and then we'd be in the classrooms by about 7 30 8 o'clock and we had um six total hours of um language learning throughout the day thankfully you do get a 10 minute break every hour and you knock off at 3 30 in the afternoon but there's no relaxing yet in fact that is not even half of what the day looks like just wait and see another interesting thing that happens is depending on your language there may also be a lot of different ranks in your class so if you are a private you could easily have a captain or even a sergeant sitting right next to you which has got to be fun right never mind the mix of different branches all learning together in the same room i wonder what this was like it was always interesting um navigating the different military cultures there was air force army marine and we had one navy most of the time and each branch has different standards and you know different things they have to do during the week to fulfill their military purpose and so it was interesting seeing everyone try to balance that with the language learning so first day first class first lesson what's that like it's your first day the teacher comes in we're all nervous we're sitting in the class and i've never spoken to a russian person before the teacher comes in speaking russian and i'm like i have no idea what you're saying like i don't know what to do but initially they switched to english because they know that you don't understand anything you go over the alphabet you practice your handwriting 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 craft symbol now let's start learning things we were expected to know everything now so we started learning words and grammar but it depends if you have arabic they spend more time on that they call it sound and script it's an initial three-week course where you go over the arabic alphabet yeah so for languages with a different script like arabic they'll spend up to a month on basic alphabet and sounds before even getting to the vocabulary if you caught that thing jackson sound and script this is a daily session before classes where students are introduced to the most basic vocabulary to get used to what the script actually looks like apparently this class is in the nickname scream and scribble you can i'll leave it to your imagination to figure out why but the idea is to prep the soldiers for success in the challenging weeks to come because at some point even the instructions in the class are going to be all in arabic and we'll see some examples of what actual 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 hearing only the target language versus getting taught actually in english because if you remember from my video on the mormon missionary training center those guys have a very strict no english rule right from the beginning the majority of the instruction was um in kind of a mix of english and korean when we first started it there was a lot more english but as we learned the language we got more korean all of our professors would speak in korean and then explain in english again and so the grammar fits every day we had maybe a paragraph or a little dialogue piece that was in korean that we were studying from and there would be new pieces of grammar new verb endings um new ways of saying things that are talked about in that paragraph and we would learn from that and all the vocabulary for that day would be in that paragraph so they would be teaching from these paragraphs every day in the beginning they do speak a decent bit of english to us just to make sure we're understanding these grammar concepts they would explain the concepts in english and then switch to russian and they'd say let me show you how this looks in the actual russian so the instruction aspect would be in english to make sure you understand it and then all the practice and application they would switch to russian but then we would do things where we would have okay wait let's take a step back the course itself was divided into three semesters and in each semester you'd have a main theme so the first semester for russian we did history the second semester we did geography and the third semester was culture so take the history class the entire lesson was in russian and we really didn't understand anything i learned how to say the pencil is on the desk and the teacher started telling us about soviet history and they know you don't understand most of what's being said but it would get you familiar with hearing the language you have workbooks with the text in front of you so you're trying to match what you're hearing with what you're reading yeah so having the context for that would obviously be helpful knowing the topic i like that as you progress on the course the teachers speak less and less english and eventually no english there will also be an hour during the day with a military instructor talking about military-specific things i imagine the vocabulary in general to be quite specific in the military i wonder are there any constraints on what's taught there was a little bit for example we didn't talk a lot of we didn't learn a lot of religious words but we did a lot of political words the language program itself is 63 weeks long and so we in that time frame we cover about three years of college level language so by the time we're done in our 63 weeks then we're pretty fluent in a lot of different areas politics communication media there's a lot of things that we did learn that was specific for our job but not as much as you would think at dli we had a second school in texas where we did more job related language and that's obviously the air force school in texas i believe they break the day's lessons into one hour blocks for reading listening and speaking skills so how do these lessons work we'd have one hour with one teacher who would teach us about a specific grammar point and then the next hour would be about like how in english we have um latin roots in korean there are chinese roots it's been in whole our learning specific roots so that we could expand and have an easier time recognizing words okay so this start you off with simple sentences and important words eventually talking more and more about word roots conjugations noun declensions and so on when we learned korean we started with basic words and phrases like hello how are you um nice to see you again and that sort of thing and then built on that and learned the grammar bits later and kept adding more vocabulary to what we already had and learning whole sentences rather than individual words and phrases you can learn grammar much better by learning the whole and then breaking it down i obviously completely agree that starting with full sentences is the best way to learn a typical exercise they're given at this stage is something like this here is your root word now here is a sentence figure out what form of this word is correct for the sentence and with a language like arabic it's really important to choose the right prefixes and suffixes or the meaning in a military context at least very often changes to something quite different and you certainly don't want to be saying the wrong thing out in the field now the method is known for making heavy use of structured repetition so if the students are given 25 new words to learn for a test then all day those words will come up in the grammar lessons over and over again and it goes like this constantly with lots of reinforcement now here's something that you won't get a lot of other language schools and it's pretty cool dialects in a language are taught right from the beginning in the classroom so if you're learning arabic for example you'll get one to two hours of foundational modern standard arabic each day for example but then you'll get trained in various dialects of arabic mind you a lot of soldiers these days are first learning the dialect in the field and then picking up standard arabic at the school afterwards and learning these dialects is so important picture this you're supporting ground operations and you get some intelligence that says your unit is about to walk into an ambush you're not gonna have time to use a dictionary consult the internet or run it through a whole chain of command to qc your work it's just you the confidence in your abilities you are of course in safe hands all these instructors are bilingual and know how to explain even the most difficult grammar or idiomatic expressions for those dialects so let's explore the structure and goals of the program at the dli there are four levels to reach native speaker fluency although you can go even higher if you want to but in order to pass and graduate you just have to reach level two which means being able to understand the gist of a conversation or accurately pick out the facts from like a news broadcast for example who what when where why at level three your understanding has become far more intuitive and you can pick up on someone's intent and motive and so on whether you reach that level or not what is up to you but certain jobs are going to require that level of understanding like cia for example so what is the primary skill that most people in the program focus on is a lot of speaking practice yes there was a lot of speaking practice in class our tests were always listening reading and speaking the goal was always to improve speaking alongside of the other skills but our final test at the end of the course um was more weighted towards listening and reading than speaking and this makes sense for l obviously because her future job is going to entail mostly listening in korean but guys will be operating in military attaching capacities for example will naturally need a lot more speaking practice to prepare themselves so it really depends on what they're going to be doing in the field and then as you progress you do more and more comprehension work looking for meaning in texts making deductions based on things that are said and this kind of work will be familiar to my students in my story learning programs because working on understanding and uncovering the language from from a context is the main priority using story in our case but i am interested to see how they balance speaking versus comprehension at the dli because i can see how learning to say stuff can be absolutely critical in the field from the beginning you can imagine the need to give very clear commands in another language but being able to understand what's going on read a difficult situation all together with cultural nuance i mean that's the really difficult and really important stuff you can't win hearts and minds after all if you don't understand how the hearts and minds themselves work so next question what does your self-study time look like so self-study we had a lot of homework that we had to do we had anywhere between 20 and 80 new vocabulary words to memorize every night usually longer over the weekend we had some sort of recording we had to make of ourselves speaking in the language oftentimes we had transcription homework where we would listen to a recording and then transcribe what we heard i think there were some other smaller types that were less common but those were the three big ones and a lot of the professors recommended um also watching the news in korean watching dramas tv shows and listening to the music and that sort of thing and me in particular since i was already interested in the 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 the natural speakers and i have stacks and stacks of books in korean that i have read or i'm trying to read ah reading books in korean of course i strongly approve although i have no idea whether they use this at the dli probably not but actually there's a huge library of free military training resources that you have open access to and we'll get to that a little bit later but first you're going to love this now check this out at the dli they have what they call an isolation immersion facility or iso immersion for sure where students can live for up to three days sometimes up to five days it's basically a chance to interact in a more realistic environment this is very cool there are kitchens sleeping quarters and things like that you'll be isolated in a world where only your new language is understood and you'll have to practice real world situations like haggling at a market for food for whatever you need or or going through customs making hotel reservations on the phone quite cool for russian the teachers would set up scenarios like one time they made it seem like we were going through an airport we had to go through that speaking russian but there'd be some kind of variable that would get thrown in the security guard would be angry because we were missing some documents or something they build little scenarios they're kind of like many speaking days to practice using the language so even if you don't get to travel to those countries they still set up those kind of opportunities and all of this is designed to help bring an appreciation for the culture obviously there are cooking days dressing in traditional clothes storytelling days where you hear about legendary warriors and heroes it's really quite something all in all each graduating class goes through three of these immersion events during their course see maybe that's what we've been missing out on all along we should be dressing up and cooking exotic food i think that's the secret but seriously going the extra mile like this really does wonders for not just absorbing the language but understanding the culture too because remember that some of these recruits are only 17 years old they've never left home i mean when i remember back to what i was like when i was 17 and when i i knew nothing at 17 it certainly knew nothing 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 fairly sure that's what the military had in mind when it introduced this next feature simulations now imagine that you've been deployed and your task is to go out and hire interpreters to help troops in the field or maybe negotiate at a border crossing well that is what simulations are designed to prepare you for here's a role-play scene in a mock village see if you can figure out what's going on [Music] those serious faces were no joke they do take it very seriously don't they so i'm curious how do you think that you would get on with this kind of training in your classes let me know in the comments and by the way i know that we do have military people watching this channel so if there's anything here that you feel i've not quite got right or misrepresented in any way please do let me know in the comments for some languages you can even do an immersion trip abroad in fact 15 of students are selected for an overseas trip of some kind which is going to be extremely motivating going to korea was always a big motivation for me and i did get to go in the middle of training oftentimes they send students for six weeks to study at one of the universities there as a foreign exchange program and that was a really great experience and made me even more enthusiastic about completing the course and returning what about jack's experience so about halfway through the course there was a small group of us that got to go on a language exchange to latvia and being there walking around not hearing english anywhere like the first time going to a restaurant communicating an idea and having them understand it 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 and so you're kind of in this little box the entire time and so on our first opportunity to go out and use the language we were thinking this is kind of cool it's not bad it was good motivation moving forward and this language exchange was five or six months in how did the soldiers do it takes more than five months to get really comfortable but i could get around i could travel go get a bus go to restaurants have basic conversations you know but yeah it was nice motivation to move forward from that cool so i thought i'd quickly show you a typical day's schedule at the dli just to get an overview of what it's like and a hint here if you think the only work after class is a healthy run around the track in army boots well you're gonna be wrong first of all remember this is proper military which means all military rules apply at 5 30 a. m or should that be oh 5 30 i don't know anyway you wake up you make your bed yep just like this then you have to do chores take out the trash and all before breakfast you have to be at the parking lot by 7 a. m for revelry and formation and when formation ends you have 25 minutes before class classes then go on till 3 30 in the afternoon with a lunch break of course you get that and at 3 30 when the day's classes are over you must quickly get into your pt uniform and hustle to get to the proper venue for an hour of physical training then of course it is dinner time 7 p.

m is mandatory study hall time you can go to the library if you want but otherwise it's in your room with the door open studying yeah so this is probably also a good time to finish your homework now it might be 9 p. m by the time study time ends but then you have to go to iron your uniform and get your boots clean because at 9 45 there is bed check formation and if you think you can get to sleep after that not a chance it is study hour again see i bet most of you are now appreciating the absolute luxury of learning a language from your living room right anyway where were we curfew is at 10 p.