Duriong my first tour 1965-1966 working with the CAP units at Phu Bai, I picked up a 30 or so words that were just enough to make me dangerous. As part of the training for my second tour assignment as an advisor to the Vietnamese narines, I attended the MATA course in 1966 at the JFK Special Warfare Center for the 8-week course for advisors heading to Nam. We had four hours of Vietnamese a day, six days a week for 8 weeks with Vietnamese nationals for language instructors. We were encouraged to speak Vietnamese as much as possible out of class and we weregiven a two-track reel-to-reel tape recorder. A Vietnamese would speak a phrase on one track and we would speak the same phrase right after it on the second track. We would play them both back and compare. This amounted to a couple of hours of study a night plus the four hours a day we got in class. I would have liked to have attended the 9-month course but there was a war on. We left the MATA course with about a 600-word vocabulary. I still had a tough time talking with the villagers and the Vietnamese Marines when I first got to Vietnam, but by the time I completed my tour 13 months later, I had developed a pretty good ear for the tonal variations that are critical. Five-day course...I don't think so!

The Army has started using Rosetta Stone as part of their language training and I have suggested the same to SCETC and the Marine Corps Cultural Training Center at Quantico.