Inside a US Military Language Classroom
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🪖🇺🇸What could be more gruelling than a military workout? Perhaps a language class? In today’s video we explore the method behind one of the most intense language classrooms in the world: the United States military.
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⏱ TIMESTAMPS:
0:00 – Intro
0:18 – The Languages
1:14 – The Schedule
2:48 – The First Few Days
4:21 – How They Teach
6:52 – Input: Reading and Listening
7:58 – Output: Speaking and Writing
10:15 – The Best Part
📜 SOURCES & ATTRIBUTIONS:
🎬 Video Clips:
Learn Korean at the Defense Language Institute (DLI)
Army Language Day for Education Week: A closer look at the DLPT.
Foreign Language: An Adventure of a Lifetime
DLI (Defense Language Institute)
U.S. Air Force Defense Language Institute
Defense Language Institute: Bridging Languages, Cultures
US Military's Language School Draws Positive Attention
U.S. Air Force Defense Language Institute
What the U.S. Army's 9-Month Language School is Like
HOW I USE DO AND USE FLASHCARDS FOR LANGUAGE LEARNING 📇 [effective flashcard method]
A day in a life of an Air Force student at DLIFLC
DLIFLC linguists in action
DLIFLC awards first B.A. degrees
This is fascinating! Keep these amazing videos coming.
affirmative!
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It can help military members too. They need it more. Very different approach to military philosophy.
This does sound really fun. Im doing this currently with Russian and Georgian.
Can you do a video on the Georgian language?
Yessss i would also love to see a video dedicated to Georgian ❤❤
@will გამარჯობა
@Mary Janerx gamarjoba to you as well 😀 unfortunately I don’t know any Georgian yet (aside from some of the letters) but I’ll def learn it some time in the future, it’s a beautiful language!
@will deda is mom დედა and mama is dad მამა,… mamatsi მამაცი means brave.
Dude, anything is harder than University of Pittsburgh 😂
I studied Korean at DLI, and I hated that everything was focused on context, like the soldier said, don’t get hung up on one word, try to get the gist. I suppose because it helps with the military job, but it went totally against the grain and every fiber of my personality. It’s a lot of guess work involved, which can very easily end up putting you in error when peoples lives are at stake.
Only later did I become aware of intelligible input, (which this is opposite) and your story methods. I wish so bad I knew about all that back then and implemented them fully from day one at DLI in my personal time. I would have done so much better, not only performance wise, but also stress and attitude and everything.
I had applied during my military days for DLI and was scheduled to be sent, but ended up being rerouted to a different MOS due to quotas. I still regret that every day.
what a shame!
My aunt had to learn French for work. She spoke not a word going to Paris, but they started her working in a bakery. People would point at what they wanted; help making change, talk about the wwweather and politics and sports, etc. She then spent 40+ years working in French-speaking African countries. Plus she knows all about croissants and baguettes!
So do you speak French or bake bread?
@Spanish Language Learning yes.
I would honestly love this for my target language
I went through in 93-94 for Arabic. The pedagogy appears to have changed quite a bit since then. But, I suppose technology has pushed a lot of that.
Uncle Olly’s straightforward face everytime he asks us to do the simple three steps, though… 😭😭🤣
Sounds very much like the Oulpan method, developed by the Israelis to teach hebrew. I learned Welsh with this method.
I am so happy to discover this Chanel
The content of it so motivating, encouraging, and stimulating xxx
I wish I had a teacher or something to just talk to and hear often to learn Portuguese. Learning by myself is very hard and very loooooong. After over a year and a half I barely understand anything in Portuguese and never really been able to speak. The one time I tried I was just choking and couldn’t get a word out with a friend due to not being able to understand them, and being scared and just felt like I forgot everything.
Been through DLI twice and it still didn’t look like what you showed.
Then again each schoolhouse within DLI has a vastly different methodology than the other. Different deans push down a different strategy to teaching team leads to try to hopefully get maximum pass rate.
Did two languages at DLI and taught there. It really is the most intensive language school in the world.
Which two languages? How long were you in the service?
I graduated in 1980 from Japanese, Went directly to Tokyo and served nine years. When I first arrived my unit had some funds they needed to spend before the end of the fiscal year. They bought me over 400 hours of direct face-to-face speaking lessons at Berlitz. My speaking ability improved significantly. I left the Army in 1989, processed out and returned to Tokyo to work for a Japanese company. I’m still here and am now a Permanent Resident, all the rights and privileges of a citizen except I can’t vote. That’s now 43 years. DLI was a good beginning. Berlitz was a great after course.
Definitely a bit different from what I experienced there (we didn’t have VR stuff, we were just transitioning to macbooks and ipods/ipads, and consequently lost the curriculum lol. Also didn’t have PFC Lingo), but it’s… mostly the same. Our teachers definitely spoke English alongside their language, and we would end up teaching each other (I understand some of the classes do adhere to the class language-only rule, though). The schedule was a bit rough. PT, 4 hours of instruction, lunch, 3 hours of instruction, some homework until study hall which was 2 hours, then more homework. Ended up being just 10-12ish hours per day of nothing but language stuff, depending on how much military stuff got thrown in and how your teaching team dealt with homework. Also, B- and below was the unofficial failing grade.
I’d probably do it again, though. Stressful, but a good time overall, and you get a language out of it.
Man this brings back memories. I studied Arabic at the DLI/FLC. I think the worst part was the number drills. So. Many. Number drills.
Most of my instructors were very nice people but weren’t necessarily skilled at teaching so a big part of the experience is taking responsibility for your own learning journey. Often class mates or friends in other classes would get together, on breaks, over lunch, or weekends and just hang out and have study sessions.
Before going to DLI I was trialing another military language program for a year where I studied primarily French but also dabbled in a few others. When I got my orders to DLI I began teaching myself Arabic from whatever resources I could find. I ended up learning the script in a couple of weeks (about twice as long as it took me to teach myself the Cyrillic script for Russian). So after months of studying Khaliji Arabic and French side by side I totally screwed myself over. They taught us MSA almost exclusively for the first year or so before they started throwing in 3 common dialects. So I had to unlearn so much and was still inadvertently switching into French during the more difficult extemporaneous speaking exercises.
@7:15 “high school wasn’t preparing you to save lives…”, while let us be honest, soldiers learning foreign languages can both defend and attack, and alas, since the end of world war 2, the world has witnessed more aggressive than defensive use of the military in one corner of the world, so while the methods are indeed “military standard” (ie. “good quality” and “efficient” and “effective”), it is quite saddening to see that these soldiers will inevitably use their acquired language skills not to make peace, rather, to kill those people whole language skills they learned… sad world we live in. Peace
This sounds amazing. I would love to go to a language boot camp like that- just don’t want to join the military.