Chinese Language Program for Foreign Service Officers

Abstract

LONG unable to recruit from among qualified candidates for the Foreign Service a sufficient number of persons already trained in Oriental languages, the State Department has subsidized two years' training for certain designated Language Officers. Since the academic approach, through literature, was expensive and time-consuming and since, prior to the war, graduates of American institutions often could not handle jobs requiring a practical working knowledge, the Department wisely set up its own program. As applied to China during the past year this program has been revitalized, and at present there are eleven Foreign Service Officers involved in full-time study. Eight months' preliminary training has been given at Yale and Cornell, which offer intensive language and area study programs, followed by eighteen months at the State Department Language School at the American Consulate in Peiping. There, as a departure from past practices, supervision is provided, and a new curriculum, based upon wartime advances in the teaching of spoken languages and dealing with documents and specialized material pertinent to the needs of the Foreign Service, has been drawn up.' In addition, more than thirty persons at posts in China have availed themselves of the Department's materials and facilities for part-time language study during the past year. The aim of the language program is to equip qualified and experienced men with a knowledge of Chinese for their consular and diplomatic work. Full-time Language Officers should be able to interpret various confidential interviews and conversations on semi-technical subjects and to handle themselves creditably at social functions as well. They should be able to read and translate newspapers and official documents; they may be called upon to check translations done by others. In view of the difficulties of Chinese orthography with its problem of characters and no alphabet, this is no small task. It must be remembered likewise that spoken Chinese has no cognates to aid the student's memory; moreover, as a tonal language it has a totally different phonetic structure from English. Since there is a specific aim in view, the program can be directed readily toward it. Our vocabularies are selected according to the needs of the workcommercial and economic, political, legal, social and shipping terms-so that classical Chinese, literary materials of a flowery and verbose nature,