Quote Originally Posted by Schmedlap View Post
WILF - I feel your pain. I did the Serbo-Croat thing. At the time, I couldn't find many resources to learn it, so I also started learning Russian, which was similar and far easier to find materials for.
We had to convert all our Russian speakers to try and grip Serbo-Croat. In a act of high farce, the Army had completely failed to track what language it actually had resident in it's ranks, and asking around revealed about 5 Serbo-croat speakers in the Navy, Air Force and the rest of the Army's regiments.

My pain was sitting next to a a guy on the then Army's new high-speed "HUMINT/Interrogation" course, and finding out he was fluent in Mandarin. His next posting was Northern Ireland.