Word: montereys
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...soldier as his accuracy in firing an M-14. Supplying American military advisers there with the right words is fast becoming the primary mission of what its graduates call "Lingo Tech": the West Coast Branch of the Defense Language Institute, located at the Army's historic Presidio in Monterey, Calif...
Operated for all the services by the Army Department, the institute had its modest beginnings in 1941 as an Army intelligence course in Japanese, now has five schools across the country. Of these, the oldest and by far the largest is the branch at Monterey, which trains up to 2,500 military personnel a year in 27 languages and 33 dialects, in courses that range from a twelve-week quickie in Vietnamese to a full 47 weeks in Chinese, Russian, Arabic and some 13 other languages...
...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...