Language Learning The Foreign Service Way
I’ve had the unique opportunity in my life to seriously study a foreign language at the Foreign Service Institute as part of my career.
As much fun as it was to get paid to study a language, the truth is that the process was pretty frustrating.
The biggest problem with the bureaucratic approach to language learning is that it’s extremely bureaucratic. You’re told that you have a certain amount of time to learn the language, and you wind up going through a preconstructed language program designed to get you from zero to an artifically designated level of “fluency” within that time.
There’s not much room for curiosity or tangents or actually diving into something. Instead, it’s all about memorizing this list of words, practicing that grammatical structure, and hoping and praying that your final language test won’t ask you to do anything you can’t actually do yet.
But the biggest problem with the Foreign Service Institute approach to language training is that it’s really only designed to get you a few miles down the road to fluency. And, well, you’re not going to really get to the place you want to go (or the place you should want to go) without putting in some hard work yourself.
Foreign language fluency is important to diplomacy precisely because language serves as a window to the soul. As former Ambassador Chas Freeman put it in his excellent book The Diplomat’s Dictionary:
The problem, of course, is that you’re not going to know “something of the soul” of your interlocuter because you toughed it out for all 24 weeks of your FSI Spanish course.
The kind of communication that effective diplomacy requires is more than you can possibly get with your 2/2 or 3/3 score in the language you were assigned to learn. No - the kind of communication we’re talking about requires years of sustained effort and practice, and requires a level of intercultural competence that is becoming increasingly rare these days.
Now, Ambassador Freeman comes from an older school of diplomatic thinking. As nice as these thoughts are, I really do have a hard time fully agreeing with them:
However, I also know that learning and studying things of deep cultural significance and importance will really open your eyes to philosophic and intellectual worlds that you never knew existed.
Perhaps this is why I continue spending time and effort on Dream of the Red Chamber. It’s a great book, sure. But, even more than that, it’s an excellent way to dive deep into the real world of Chinese culture and thought.
I might not be an official diplomat anymore. However, I would argue that projects like this are just as important to true cross-cultural communication and understanding as delivering official démarches and white papers to the host country’s foreign ministry.
And, besides, it’s a lot more fun to read a book than to read stilted diplomatic correspondance.