Word: monterey
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Drop a Pencil. The language training at Monterey is the most intense in the U.S., and students joke: "If you drop a pencil in class and take time to pick it up, you've lost an hour's material." Classes run for six hours a day five days a week, interrupted by two two-week vacations throughout the year. Students are expected to spend three hours or more daily on homework...
...Starting first with the mastery of sound, they mimic every word of their instructors-most of them natives of the country whose language they teach. Gradually, students move up from sounds to basic grammar to sentences to conversation and writing. To supplement class work, they have textbooks written by Monterey's 381-man faculty, individual tape recorders, closed-circuit television films in the institute's elaborate language...
...real mission," says Dr. Erwin Gordon, an academic adviser to the institute, "is communication, not vocabulary or grammar." Monterey's students get heavy doses of local history and culture, often take time out to sample the native cuisine-if available-in San Francisco restaurants. To test a student's practical command of his language, Monterey has set up facsimile banks, post offices and stores where he is forced to negotiate a bank loan, mail home a package or shop for his dinner-all without lapsing into English...
...laughs at, Gordon figures, he is approaching mastery of the language. For Americans, gaining this kind of mastery in Vietnamese is especially hard. As in Chinese, the same word spoken at five or six different pitches has five or six different meanings. Moreover, Vietnamese has three dialects, of which Monterey teaches two: the classic dialect of Hanoi, with six tones, and that of Saigon, which has five...
...meet the heavy demands of the war, the institute now offers a twelve-week crash program in Vietnamese, in addition to the standard 47-week course. Graduates will have a minimum vocabulary of 1,000 words-including all essential military terms. This year, Monterey will graduate 1,000 men from its Vietnamese classes, compared with 150 five years ago. Some may not live long with their knowledge; a bronze memorial plaque, already inscribed with the names of 25 Monterey graduates, has been placed on the door of the Far East Division building...