More on the Defense Language Institute

Two more videos here and here (these two have almost identical scripts, and were filmed in 1970 and 1978; the latter one shows what glorious facial hair America grew to celebrate the bicentenary).  Just as the 1953 one had a lot of Korean in it, the 1970 one has lots of Vietnamese and the 1978 one lots of Russian.  Really interesting to see that hanja are still being taught in the 70s in the Korean class.

I read Anthony Kenny's A Path From Rome some years ago, a good account of Catholic life in England as observed by a young man who became a priest but then left the priesthood back when this was a very unusual thing to do.  Back then, in the 50s, trainee priests had a seriously good command of Latin: they weren't quite fluent in the sense of being able to converse without strain, but they were pretty close.  A few months ago I saw a documentary about modern English trainee priests, and they seemed to be doing only GCSE-level Latin in the first year or two of their training.  It's a different world.