A reader and fellow blogger sent me a piece on the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center’s Korean program that should be of interest to those of us plugging away at learning Korean:
MONTEREY, Calif.– Preferring to trust their own enlistees over civilians hired from ethnic communities, the military is training men and women in the armed forces in strategic languages including Arabic, Russian, Farsi, Chinese and, of course, Korean.
The next generation of Korean speakers at the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center (DLI) does not necessarily share the same ethnicity. Hailing from all over the United States, the 300 students who graduate from the school?????s Korean language program every year are united by their passion to learn.
Those undergoing the minimum of six hours of instruction every day, five days a week for 63 weeks, are men and women of the U.S. armed forces who volunteered to help meet the military’s need for Korean speakers.
Brutal. Piece mentions some of the motivations of the learners:
These students include the likes of Marine Corporal Anderson Bryant, a native of Seattle who had personal reasons for wanting to learn Korean. “I got a lot of Asian friends back home, and I always go over to my Korean buddy’s house, and his mom would always yell at him in Korean,” said Bryant, who now visits his friends’ homes near Monterey at least once a week to eat Korean food. “I never understood any of it, so I thought it would be kind of cool to learn.”
Army Specialist Benjamin Poernomo shares a similar experience. “I grew up in New York, so I got exposure to Korean American culture, Korean American people and street-level Korean language.”
Other motives were as practical as enhancing job security. Marine Lance Corporal Mary Gilreath, who has a degree in film, knows firsthand about that unpredictable industry. Jobs using Korean language skills, she said, could provide a more steady income.
“With this, you know you can get jobs, and you know you have a skill that you can use. And it makes you feel a lot better,” said Gilreath.
Some simply wanted a challenge. “I actually asked for Korean or Arabic because I figured that was probably the two languages that they needed people for the most, and I didn?????t want to do something too easy,” said Marine Lance Corporal Tyler Joyner.
And sometimes, the reasons are more simple. “I just always wanted to go to Korea,” said Navy Seaman Kimberly Clark, “I’ve always heard it’s a really beautiful country.”
Luckily, nobody said, “I wanna talk to Korean chicks.” By the way, culture is apparently a big component of the course:
Students are also taught not to misinterpret certain gestures that might seem obvious in the United States, for example, when to look someone in the eye and when to look down, such as during a scolding. Sergeant First Class Mark Blasingim, an instructor with 24 years of experience in Korean language and culture, makes sure his students are not caught off guard.
“We tell them, ‘Hey, don’t be surprised if you see Korean guys walking hand in arm down the street,’” Blasingim said. “‘Don’t be surprised if you go to a bar and you see Korean guys grab each other and start to dance together. And if you’ve got really hairy arms, don’t be surprised if a Korean guy starts talking to you and he just starts running his hands up and down your arm. It’s like, “Wow, you’ve got so much hair on your arms. We don’t have hair on our arms. Look at that. Wow.’ So you just have to let the soldiers know that these are not homosexual advances.”
Of course not — there are no gays in Korea. Might be a disappointment to some, however.
Maybe soon-to-be White House National Security Council Asia Director Victor Cha should give the course a spin — apparently, he a little too twinkie for the Hankyoreh’s taste.
Anyway, read the rest on your own.
UPDATE: It appears this piece was covered by another blogger a while back.
29 Comments
so the instructor wanted to make sure big strong western men didn’t
mistake korean men for homosexuals, huh? korean women hold hands and dance
together too. interesting he doesn’t mention that. maybe he got slapped around
in korea by some k-dudes just like many of you.
All I can say is I hope the Koreans in the schoolhouse are teaching and administering the program better than when the grad rate was under 10% and the other Cat 4 languages were over 50% and higher. The reporters obviously found the few who didn’t realize the US military was abusing their talent for languages with the one language most service members didn’t want to study, for the overseas assignment no one wants to have.
‘for an assignment nobody wants to have and a language nobody wants
to learn.’
did you read the article above? i think the article states the there are those
who want to study korean. and according to the stars and stripes, requests
for korea has increased since the start of the Bushraqi War. wonder why.
‘the korean’s ass is God.’ infidel on his website many moons ago.
the korean program at DLI is a joke. it has the lowest graduation rate and the lowest scores on the DLPT. they recycle more students than any other school and last i heard were being investigated for their incompetence by a congressional committee.
as a former attendee in classes there, i can tell you that the program is designed to protect the teachers careers and job security and not to produce qualified korean speakers. having also attended an immersion program at yonsei, i hated the way DLI taught korean. we would start chapters by learning the new vocabulary the night before, take a test on the new vocab prior to class starting, then ram through a chapters material in less that 3 days. at that pace, we didn’t have time to properly practice all the material. at the end of the chapter is the grammer rules. why are the rules at the end of the chapter? beats me, we should have learned the grammer rules up front like i did at yonsei but no, can’t have that. you think 6 hours in class is bad? try the 3 to 5 hours of homework every night and see if you don’t go crazy.
god help you if you fight the system to try and improve it. the teachers union will try to destroy you.
My own impression of DLI, which I never attended (four languages at S-2/R-2 to S-3/R-3 level, none learnt at DLI) was that they would do better to drop the classroom style and adopt a military total immersion model akin to the Foreign Legion’s. It’s amazing how quickly you can learn the concepts “up” and “down” while in the front leaning rest.
Yes, all you DLI grads will skewer me, but consider this: How many more competent Korean speakers would we have if there was a U.S. military component comparable to the KATUSAs, (USATKA’s?) which placed soldiers learning Korean down in Korean cadred units within Korean Army units far removed from Seoul, where the students had to “sink or swim”?
Hey, Captain Scarlet, do you have any more info about this congressional investigation into the Korean school at DLI? I’d sure like to contribute, or at least follow the proceedings. BTW, I tried to send you an email to the address that your site provided, but the AOL postmaster returned it.
Obviously I am in the minority here, but I attended DLI and found it to be fairly good. It is also interesting to note that from what I have heard from other people who are associated with teaching Korean in the States and Canada, that DLI does a fairly good job. Perhaps it was better when I went (1990), but I would have thought it was better now that they have increased the length of the school. Yes, the attrition rate was extremely high and at times it did look like a waste of money because we tended to start with 30-34 students and only 12-15 would graduate. Throw in the advanced school and military language school afterwards and our attrition rate went even higher. I think that it was part of the scare tactic to remind students that Korean had a large failure rate - something like the special forces does and the marines do - they remind you how many started and how few were accepted and graduated.
Were there problems with the teachers - yes. I found that most of the Koreans were out of touch with ‘modern’ Korea. I learned Korean pretty much on my own for five years prior to going to DLI - in fact I was reclassified while in Korea and sent to DLI. I remember several times having disagreements with the teachers over words that were in current use (true, they tended to be slang), but I thought that the teachers should at least have some idea.
The Yonsei comment - I also went to Yonsei and also Sogang and Ajou University for language classes. At Yonsei I found the teachers as being the worst - not in skill but in attitude. I had a teacher that somehow was unaware that there are words that males use that women don’t. (I am still unsure what this was about - perhaps it was that time of the month). I said a phrase that means good/old friends (used by males) [a part of the male anatomy and then the word friend] and she insisted that there was no phrase like that and it was something I made up. We only solved this problem by having a male teacher confirm what I had said.
I had problems on a test because I had one answer marked incorrectly with the excuse that they had not taught that word so I should not have used it. Then when I pointed out to them that another question had a word in it that they had not taught us it was patiently explained to me that “students are expected to learn new words on their own.” Hello………
The military also sends students to Yonsei and also to Sogang University. It is my understanding that part of the DLI training is a course with Yonsei if you are sent to Korea. I am not quite sure if that is accurate because I left the service prior to it supposedly being started.
Back to DLI - yes, there were a lot of teachers that were stuck on “the Korean thing” in which they evaluated students on criteria that was not part of the lesson outline. If they liked you - they were more lenient. If you were older - they were lenient. If you held a higher rank - they were lenient. It is unfair, but true, and it is also Korean.
As to students wanting to be there. To be honest, most of the students that I went to school with did not want to study Korean. It was flattering that they were in a CAT 4 level language (said to be the hardest out of the CAT4) taught at Monterey, but that soon wore off. There were a number of us that were there because we wanted to to be there, but I think the majority were not as happy.
When you look at DLI you have to look at it in a different light than you would think about learning Korean at Yonsei or at a school in the States/Canada or Australia: you are there to learn the language in order to do your job - not to talk with the general population (you do learn that, but it is not the target) but to become familiarized and accustomed to the language so that you can learn the next step - the military language of your target nation. Not many Americans that did not serve in the military or have something to do with the military can understand ‘military jargon.’
To sum it - DLI accomplished pretty much what it set out to do, familiarize the soldier/sailor/airman with the language.
nulji maripkan: Obviously a kimchi-eater who got his (posterior) kicked by a GI. A GI who then went home with nulji maripkan’s girlfriend and (copulated with) her with something recognizable as a (male appendage) — probably the first decent (act of coitus) nulji maripkan’s Korean girlfriend ever had.
Marmot’s Note: Comment edited for content. Ordinarily, I would have let the comment stand as is as it was precisely the kind nulji was looking for, but there’s some good commentary going on in this thread so I needed to clean it up a bit.
infidel,
i haven’t been following it and i don’t think you can get info on an ongoing investigation. however, if you want to contribute, you can probably contact the IG and they can tell you how to add your piece.
i’ll have to update my address on the page. if you need anything else.. send it to this address.. slipstream341@yahoo.com
robert,
they don’t send anyone but FAO officers to follow-on training at universities in seoul. and if they send them anywhere now.. it is sogang. again, my comments in comparing yonsei and DLI were based on the programs, not the quality of the teachers.
Captain Scarlet -
I haven’t been in the military for over seven years but, while I was in, we sent enlisted as well as officers to Yonsei. Generally special forces went to Sogang. While in the military I had the opportunity to attend Yonsei at least once and on base we also had courses that were taught by Yonsei teachers brought to the base. In fact, we were required to attend training at least once a week for a couple of hours with Yonsei teachers. This program I thought was very bad - a complete waste of time. Hopefully that has been changed, but remembering how the military was - I doubt it.
wow do people really give a damn? i’m impressed!
I graduated that program about a yr and a half ago, and it hasn’t changed. The Korean school is a sad joke. It still is indeed a bastion of flawed Korean methodology, Koreans who have fled to the states and are full of self loathing, and racism. Especially towards Kyopos who don’t speak at least banmal halfway well, and towards students of japanese heritage. Black students also tend to have a very hard time there. I’m usually quick to chalk that kind of complaint up as whining, but there I saw it again and again.
However…There were some very good teachers there, who eventually decided they would rather teach their students well and look for better work later than suck up to the old throwbacks running the place. The above mentioned Blasingham was one such. A real crusader. Also a real big mofo. That fool that was talking trash about him getting smacked around by Koreans in an above comment had me rolling on the floor here.
Thanks for the funnies moron. And why you talking junk about the man for if you never met him? That make your testicles swell up or something?
I have to say that the DLI Korean course was a lame attempt. The best way to pass is to become a friend of the teaching team leader. Lord knows if they decide they dont like you they just kick you out.
Many of the older teachers still have the decidedly Korean mentality that if you fail you arent trying hard enough and would rather shun you then try to help you. (They put all their eggs in the star students basket and hope for the best while trimming the fat out of their class) I have seen teams cleanse out anyone who they had the faintest doubt about from their class just prior to the DLPT and then boast about how high their pass rate was. It is not hard to get a 50% pass rate with less then ten people in your class.
I try to not be negative towards the teachers and the program purely on the basis that they are Koreans, but the stubborn adherence to the worst aspects of their culture really turns me off. Basically they need to stop worrying about their pass rates, who is the top dog of the hierarchy, and what particular set of genitals a person has and teach their language.
As far as the courses in Korea itself go, they are given to enlisted and officer alike. So long as the person doing the scheduling likes you and has the mental capacity to use a calender and make a proper schedule (Thats the problem I see most often). Lord help you if you are “mission essential”, that appears to mean you are out of luck on the whole course taking matter because no one else feels like learning to do your job, or theirs if it happens to be the same one.
On to the subject of the new DLPT. If everyone should cease the wailing and gnashing of teeth they would probably realize that the pass rates will go up as soon as the new cheat sheet gets passed around. I dont mean a real cheat sheet but if everyone who has actually taken the course will remember the old version ran amazingly close to a certain book that was given to all the students and studied ad nauseum.
Alright I will end my ranting now I suppose.
The U.S. Army has sent enlisted to Korean universities for quite a while..
I second that the Korean program at DLI is a joke, in comparison to almost every other language program. In all honesty, I believe that the program’s deficiencies are directly related to Korean culture, insofar as how schools are run in Korea. Alot of that (which is broken) filters into the DLI program, and causes DLI Korean students to consistently have the lowest morale, proficiency, and graduation rate of any language at DLI, to include Chinese and Arabic.
I’ll also say that I participated in validation of the new proficiency test… which was such an absurd experience that I won’t get into it here.
I am a 1990 DLI graduate in Mandarin, and found the Mandarin program to be excellent. Our teachers were first-rate and most of the students ended up doing very well on the DLPT despite the “Category 4″ difficulty of the language.
We did note, however, profound dissatisfaction among the students of the Korean department (who all did very poorly on the DLPT), and an odd schism between the Korean school and the rest of DLI. After getting my wisdom teeth pulled and missing a week of classes (24 hours of instruction plus 15 hours of study hall — that’s like a half semester of college instruction), the Navy offered to recycle me into Korean.
So I asked one of the Chinese teachers (the legendary Mrs. Ma, 70 year-old sweetie) whether she thought it was a good idea and she said it was a horrible idea. She said the students don’t learn anything and “neither do the teachers”.
At the time I was too green to know that’s a byproduct of Korea’s 5000 years of history, but now it seems obvious.
The answer? If you’re headed to Monterey, don’t take Korean there — no matter how much bonus is offered.
The bad news is there is no good instruction available in Korea either. Like Robert Neff, I have attended Yonsei University’s Korean Language Institute and found it a complete and tragic waste of time. In 1996 I won a supposedly-prestigious Korea Foundation fellowship for research and while back in Seoul I enrolled at Yonsei. The teachers were so incredibly arrogant and stupid, and the curriculum is aimed solely at those of Korean ethnicity seeking to be able to discuss ghosts, goblins, and National Treasure Number blankety-blank with their halmoni. There seems to be no conception that anybody would be an intermediate-level student hoping to use the language for work or business.
I don’t know how DLI used to be, but it seems to be improving fast. Maybe it had nowhere to go but up but that’s what I’ve heard lately. Actually I expect to visit there on some business in May so I’ll get to see firsthand.
The links on my blog (linked from this post) don’t seem to be working. Sorry.
Last month I returned to Monterey for the first time since 1990, and had to smile as I was driven past the Carl’s Jr. on Lighthouse. That was the scene of one of my earliest disillusionings.
My buddy Seaman Apprentice Dworin and I (full Seaman, don’tcha know) had scooted down to Carl’s Jr for lunch. It was summer 1989, which meant we were in our short-sleeve summer whites (and, if you know Monterey weather, it meant we were freezing). The girl at the counter who took our order asked if we were DLI students.
“Yes. We. Are,” we said proudly, because we knew that these languages (Mandarin in my case, Spanish in Dworin’s) were going to be the key to bright, bright futures.
“That’s great,” she responded. “I studied Russian there six years ago. Would you like fries with that?”
Any of you Korean language folks know if there’s a specific frequency on AM radio where I can pick up North Korean broadcasts? Is it just random? I can’t seem to find any broadcasts but a buddy of mine says he used to listen to them back in the 90’s.
I can’t give you an exact frequency, but I have received such broadcasts on several occasions while driving north on “Freedom Highway” between Ilsan and points north after nightfall.
Brendon Carr wrote: “the curriculum is aimed solely at those of Korean ethnicity seeking to be able to discuss ghosts, goblins, and National Treasure Number blankety-blank with their halmoni.”
Ding! dead on!
Brendon,
Good story
I used to work with a guy who had attended DLI (perhaps late 80s or early 90s) who had an excellent vocabulary, but whose pronunciation was complete shite. Any ideas on that?
Brendon Carr #15 wrote:
And being able to explain Korean culture 101 (using both hands, not smoking in front of elders, etc.) to FOB Westerners gaping in wonder at the awe of 5,000 years of glorious civilization. Former Yonsei prisoners will recall Johnson, the American character in textbook levels 1-3.
While I was at Yonsei, they introduced an evening program, taking 80% of the 20 hrs/wk regular curriculum and cramming it into 9 hrs/wk in the evenings. Brilliant. Every class was a parade of munhyungs and vocabulary to memorize. Even with the faculty discount, I opted not to re-enroll the following semester.
The other problem with Yonsei is that little time is spent developing oral fluency, a strong point of the Sogang program. I think Yonsei’s Korean teachers assume that since we live in Korea, we can use the language outside of class, but that’s not true for non-Asians not married to Korean spouses. I took Chinese and Japanese language classes at Yonsei’s FLI and was very pleased with the instruction; the language was practical, the teaching materials not condescending, and the teachers gave us many opportunities to try out and use the new language. I like to tell people that at Yonsei, they teach every language but Korean well.
One huge problem with DLI is that the lions share of the work those folks are training for is listening and copying live transmissions. As a result they have great vocabs and listening skills and can write (as in copy) like the dickens, but conversation and composition skills are severely lacking.
I found the textbooks at U of Hawaii far more helpful than anything else I’ve seen on the market. I’m curious if anyone has actually taken a class there or at a Univ. in the states that utilizes those books.
Although I never went to DLI, but have many friends who did. Some have retained the language, some have not. Those who didn’t’ got follow on assignments like Georgia or the Horn of Africa (HOA – did use his Swahili there). There were ok with the instruction, but that was all over 10 years ago. Never met anyone who was wild about it, but did meet one AF enlisted, with no prior Korean familiarity, who came out near 4/4.
I attended two Korean programs in Seoul, one of them at Yonsei on a FLAS. Unlike some commenters, I found the program to be excellent, particularly when compared to the other program I attended some years earlier. Sounds like it depends on the instructors to a large degree. It was only a refresher, and I was in country unaccompanied and living in a ha-suk-chip, so I used (or tried to) Korean exclusively while there. That worked well. . . but I’m now very rusty, again.
As for reasons to want to learn Korean or other foreign languages, I’m surprised no one said, “I wanted to meet stimulating and interesting people of an ancient culture, and kill them.”
“I think Yonsei’s Korean teachers assume that since we live in Korea, we can use the language outside of class, but that’s not true for non-Asians not married to Korean spouses.”
Of course you can. Just get out there and speak. If you really think you can’t, then why bother studying in the first place?
I don’t have any illusions about the ability of non-Asians to integrate in Korean society. But don’t use that as an excuse. Go out and speak.
Colontos, some clarification is needed. I did insist on using Korean in public, but often heard English in reply. As my Korean got better, I heard more Korean and less English, but it is a slower and longer road to fluency for “English faces” in Korea. My Korean is now fluent enough to interpret at parent-teacher conferences. Obviously, I didn’t reach that level by “not bothering.” Living in China, strangely enough, offered me many authentic opportunities to use Korean when communicating with non-English speaking Korean parents and students at the international school where I worked.
Ah, I understand now; misinterpreted your previous comment a bit. I was aware that your Korean is very good, but I was a bit confused. I’m sure you know that some people do use a similar excuse to avoid learning languages. My bad!
I just figured I’d post an update on here about the Korean class at the DLI. I’m in a 50 week program so I don’t know exactly how the current 63 week normal program is but I can honestly tell you that it’s far easier than I thought it would be. The homework every night is not nearly as bad as everyone says. I have yet to meet anyone that really gets more than 2 hours of homework in a night and the pass rate now is almost 90%, with more than half getting at least a 2+ on both listening and reading. It’s not an ideal system at all and it would help a lot more with more immersion trips to Korean than they offer, but there’s not much I can do about that.