Planned Babel

Monterey, a pleasant, picturesque seafaring town 125 miles down the California coast from San Francisco, includes among its 16,000 population two notable linguistic groups: the sardine fishermen, who speak Portuguese, and the U.S. Army and Air Force men, who speak in many tongues--Russian, Arabic, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, German, Chinese (both Cantonese and Mandarin), Japanese, Korean, Albanian, Bulgarian, Czech, Persian, Hungarian, Rumanian, Greek, Polish, Turkish, Serbo-Croatian, Danish, Norwegian and Swedish. Last week 190 new officers and men arrived in town. Within eleven months, most of them will also be speaking new languages with rapid-fire fluency.

For ten years, the Army Language School has been preparing corporals, captains, and colonels alike for jobs as interpreters, attaches and occupation officials. The school began with only 60 students and one language (Japanese), but grew until it now has an enrollment of 933, a curriculum of 24 languages, and a faculty of 310.

Portuguese Eisenhower. Its methods are far removed from ordinary U.S. language teaching. "The one word I object to around here," says Colonel Charles Barnwell, the C.O., "is grammar. We don't burden the student with masses of rules and exceptions. Our big ambition is to make a man speak and understand." The speaking begins right in the first class. "Are you a student?" a Danish instructor will demand. "Ja, jeg er elev" [Yes, I am a student], the class must learn to answer. "Is he a student?" asks the instructor. "Ja, han er ogsaa." A class may consist of only one student, is never larger than eight. The men average 30 hours in class and 15 at outside study a week.

At first, students are not bothered with spelling; most of their homework is with phonograph records, and the textbooks they do use are spelled phonetically. Gradually, after weeks of listening to long lists of recorded words and phrases, students begin to read, starting with simple cartoon captions and working up to newspapers and regular books. Meanwhile in class and mess hall, they converse constantly, act out skits (e.g., parachuting into enemy territory), see movies with foreign languages dubbed in (among them: The True Glory, with General Dwight D. Eisenhower speaking a rippling, dubbed-in Portuguese). Finally, near the end of the course, students cut their way through a jungle of diplomatic, technical and military terms, until such formidable words as protivotankovoe ruzhie (Russian for anti-tank rifle) come tripping off the tongue.

Original Goethe. The school's faculty are all civilians, but not all trained teachers. One Czech instructor was a judge in Prague; a Russian was the son of a czarist general; a Rumanian D.P. was a stock boy in a Detroit department store. But in their own lands, many were noted scholars; they have come to the school via concentration camps, from jobs as elevator men and lemon pickers, and in some cases from U.S. university faculties. To make sure they keep in touch with student problems, all teachers must put in time on an unfamiliar language.

Under Colonel Barnwell, an Army regular (who speaks nothing but English), the school bears little resemblance to the usual Army post. "It is a college," says the colonel, "not a guardhouse." There is little saluting or parading, and no required study hours. But in ten years, the school has turned out 2,995 able linguists, now scattered all over the world, speaking the local language without the hindrance of interpreters, and able to read Pushkin, Balzac, Goethe or Sun Tzu in the original. Says Colonel Barnwell: "If the U.S. had only had a school like this 40 years ago, who knows how many messes we could have avoided?"

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