Lingo Tech

In the jungle battlefields of Viet Nam, knowing the Vietnamese language may be as important to a U.S. soldier as his accuracy in firing an M-14. Supplying American military advisers there with the right words is fast becoming the primary mission of what its graduates call "Lingo Tech": the West Coast Branch of the Defense Language Institute, located at the Army's historic Presidio in Monterey, Calif.

Operated for all the services by the Army Department, the institute had its modest beginnings in 1941 as an Army intelligence course in Japanese, now has five schools across the country. Of these, the oldest and by far the largest is the branch at Monterey, which trains up to 2,500 military personnel a year in 27 languages and 33 dialects, in courses that range from a twelve-week quickie in Vietnamese to a full 47 weeks in Chinese, Russian, Arabic and some 13 other languages.

Don't Drop a Pencil. The language training at Monterey is the most intense in the U.S., and students joke: "If you drop a pencil in class and take time to pick it up, you've lost an hour's material." Classes run for six hours a day five days a week, interrupted by two two-week vacations throughout the year. Students are expected to spend three hours or more daily on homework.

As at Berlitz, students are totally immersed in the language from the moment they enter class. No English is spoken, and students are assigned native pseudonyms by which they are known throughout the course. Starting first with the mastery of sound, they mimic every word of their instructors--most of them natives of the country whose language they teach. Gradually, students move up from sounds to basic grammar to sentences to conversation and writing. To supplement class work, they have textbooks written by Monterey's 381-man faculty, individual tape recorders, closed-circuit television films in the institute's elaborate language lab.

"Our real mission," says Dr. Erwin Gordon, an academic adviser to the institute, "is communication, not vocabulary or grammar." Monterey's students get heavy doses of local history and culture, often take time out to sample the native cuisine--if available--in San Francisco restaurants. To test a student's practical command of his language, Monterey has set up facsimile banks, post offices and stores where he is forced to negotiate a bank loan, mail home a package or shop for his dinner--all without lapsing into English.

Adviros in Battle. Students of the institute have an additional exercise unavailable in other language schools: mock warfare is enacted on two sides of a partition, with the student "adviros" (advisers) talking back and forth on the telephone. At the end of the battle, students compare notes to see if they were successfully getting the messages across. By the time a student laughs at the same thing a native laughs at, Gordon figures, he is approaching mastery of the language. For Americans, gaining this kind of mastery in Vietnamese is especially hard. As in Chinese, the same word spoken at five or six different pitches has five or six different meanings. Moreover, Vietnamese has three dialects, of which Monterey teaches two: the classic dialect of Hanoi, with six tones, and that of Saigon, which has five.

To meet the heavy demands of the war, the institute now offers a twelve-week crash program in Vietnamese, in addition to the standard 47-week course. Graduates will have a minimum vocabulary of 1,000 words--including all essential military terms. This year, Monterey will graduate 1,000 men from its Vietnamese classes, compared with 150 five years ago. Some may not live long with their knowledge; a bronze memorial plaque, already inscribed with the names of 25 Monterey graduates, has been placed on the door of the Far East Division building.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.