Quote Originally Posted by Stan View Post
The article's authors spend an exorbitant amount of time pondering over language skills. I've known NSA and Agency folks with 10 times my language abilities, yet lacked the ability to negotiate a deal in an African Flea Market... LMDAO.

Far too many complex and unexpected issues resulting from lack of cultural knowledge to hinge the entire outcome on language abilities alone, and certainly not enough time to accurately gauge an outcome to the program anywhere on creation.

Now we go and judge one of the only two "language qualified" candidates based on a beer night out with a bunch of soldiers, who later ends ups engaged to a classmate. Huh ??? Pathetic !
When I was stationed in Korea I would quite often find that I was more able to work with the ROK and Katusa's then many of the linguists who were far more linguistically capable than I. For the most part it generally came down to the fact that I got along better with them then those other guys and thus they were more willing to excuse my failings on a linguistic front and actually spent a lot of time trying to help me become more proficient.

More often than not most of the problems I saw occur with many of the linguist was that because they understood what the Korean soldiers said, they assumed this actually equated to understanding what they meant. Which quite often would turn out to not be the case.