MarSOC fast-tracks critical language skills - Marine Corps News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Marine Corps Times

MarSOC fast-tracks critical language skills

CAMP LEJEUNE, N.C. — Marine Corps Forces Special Operations Command has launched an ambitious yearlong course to make Marines fluent in some of the world’s most difficult languages.

The Advanced Linguist Course is the first of its kind in the military. Students will have 52 weeks to develop the ability to understand, speak and read Pashto, Dari and Urdu, all of which Marines have encountered in Afghanistan. That’s two months faster than similar courses at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, Calif., said Tanya Woodcook, MarSOC’s component language program manager.

MarSOC also teaches 36-week courses in French, spoken throughout parts of Africa, and Bahasa, the primary language of Indonesia. Next year, the program will expand to include Arabic and Portuguese.

“We develop negotiators and Marines that will establish relationships” with the local populace, she said. “It’s a very intricate skill.”

Courses began June 1. In addition to formal classroom work taught by instructors contracted through DLI, students will be immersed in an environment within the U.S. where only that language is spoken. Then they’ll spend up to six weeks in a foreign country where the target language is common.

Various forms of technology — from electronic whiteboards to individual work stations with commercial Internet access — will be used throughout the curriculum as well, and eventually every student will have a laptop.

MarSOC officials tapped 17 recent graduates from the command’s first Individual Training Course to spend the next 36 to 52 weeks in one of the five classes. They used Marines’ Defense Language Aptitude Battery Test scores to help determine who was best suited for learning the more difficult languages, Woodcook said. Only enlisted Marines are selected for the program.

Each course is five days a week, six hours a day. At the end of every day, the students must know at least two new phrases. Then there’s homework in the evenings.

While fellow special operators prepare to deploy around the world, these Marines meet in white-walled classrooms inside temporary trailers set up at Camp Lejeune’s Stone Bay training area. All five languages are taught there; Dari and Pashto also are offered on the West Coast.

In the Pashto class, the students repeat basic sentences such as “He is Mahmood’s father.” Although he misses being in the field, one sergeant, who declined to give his name, said he is happy he was selected to learn a foreign language.

“This is something that’s … going to allow me to be out operating more,” he said.

Pashto, which is spoken in Afghanistan’s southern provinces, is particularly difficult to learn for Americans because its pronunciation is very unusual, Woodcook said.

“It’s definitely challenging, but it’s not impossible,” the sergeant said. “It’s not overwhelming.”

Slowly, he’s becoming more familiar with the Pashto alphabet and is starting to be able to read words his instructors write on the board. Pashto is written from right to left and, to the untrained eye, looks like a series of scribbles and dots.

In the next classroom, Marines and their instructors converse in Dari, common to Afghanistan’s central, northern and western provinces.

“What it’s going to do is allow us first-hand interaction with the locals,” said a staff sergeant. “It will extend our capabilities.”

Learning Dari is difficult, he said, but he expects to be fluent by the end of the course.