Army Language School

Interesting documentary here (various formats) about US Army language training, circa 1953 (date guessed from the reference to the Korean War peace talks at Panmunjom).  I felt relieved for the class that had had the good fortune to be selected for Korean, which at least has a very rational writing system... but then we see them later down the line writing hanja, which were not as officially defunct then as they are now.  Armies know what they want from linguist-soldiers, and are good at getting it; and since learning a language is better than square-bashing or being shot at, the students tend to be well-motivated against the threat of having to drop out.  Forty-something weeks to full fluency is pretty impressive.

Anthony Burgess in one of his books on language debunks the myth that the British are rubbish at foreign languages: we can be good at them when there's a specific financial imperative, such as a proficiency bar in the old Colonial Service.  He inevitably claimed to have been brilliant: I passed my Standard One at distinction level after three months of instruction.  This did not make me popular among my fellow-expatriates.  I went on to pass my Standard Two in less than a year, a Federation record.  This made me hated.  Before leaving Malaya I took the optional Standard Three examination, all hard Arabic and Sanskrit loanwords and scrawled Jawi, which conferred a bonus.  This made me worse hated, but I did not care.  (From the not-always-believable "Little Wilson and Big God").  Memoirs and biographies of old Colonial characters such as George Orwell (who mastered several local languages when out in Burma) show that as a country we're not inherently rubbish at languages.