Language and Cultural Awareness Transformation

[Uboat509]

Understanding one's ability to comprehend languages and cultures is indeed fascinating. You'll never appreciate it til you witness first-hand just how much that ability can save your Alpha (when you most need it). Using terps is a mixed bag, and best left to those who truly understand the culture (there's little pay off if the terp is communicating via his/her culture (no matter how much we're paying) - the one you don't comprehend).

I agree, in principle but...

Language and cultural training is certainly time consuming and definitely won't be productive overnight. There's no proficiency lessons in the USA - gotta get on the ground and practice under fire.

Is it going to be productive enough to spend all the time and resources to get every leader proficient in it (an extremely unlikely scenario given the number of people who lack either the aptitude or the interest to become proficient)? When I went through the Q course, Arabic was a six month course of eight hour days, five days a week. At the end of that time the students were expected to achieve a 0+/0+ to graduate. Most struggled to meet that goal. Some did excel but most were back to a 0+/0+ within a year because we simply do not have the time it takes to maintain proficiency, and that's the guys who have deployed to Iraq. If they have not then it is even harder.

Gotta disagree with you here. Latin is the base of most languages to include Estonian. Without a basic understanding of English however, the rest will merely be Greek. The educational system we have is broken and weak, and pushing some foreign language at an early age will not only increase interest, but will increase our next generation's ability to learn and adapt to new cultures.

This is the exact argument that my parents used when they made me take two years of Latin high school. I can honestly say that it was two years of my life that I will never have back.

SFC W