DARPA Funds Game To Teach Arabic To Army

finnhart writes "According to a [free reg. req.] New York Times article, DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) has funded a project at the University of Southern California's School of Engineering to create a 'virtual camp' in which US soldiers can learn to speak Arabic, as well as learn local customs: 'All discussions with the villagers will have to be conducted in Arabic, and Sergeant Smith must comport himself with the utmost awareness of local customs so as not to arouse hostility. If successful, he will be paving the way for the rest of his unit to begin reconstruction work in the village'."

Comments

Google Link

[Anonymous Coward]

Virtual Camp Trains Soldiers in Arabic, and More

That's virtual camp, not cave.

Re:Google Link

[justanyone]

Ummmm... I'm sorry to disappoint, but Iranians speak Farsi, not arabic.

To Quote from the Wikipedia article:

It should be noted that human languages, and the alphabet used to represent those languages in written form, are two different concepts and alphabets are not intrinsic to human languages. As such, Persian and Arabic are two entirely different languages from different linguistic families, with different phonology and grammar.

Persian adds four letters to the Arabic alphabet for its use, due to the fact the four sounds that exist in Persian do not exist in Arabic.

Re:Yay!

[ForestGrump]

The Arabic slang for "loser" is "fashel".
-Grump...it hurts to be called "fashel" =P

Re:Oh, for cryin' out loud

[swillden]

But don't waste a red cent teaching 'em how to kowtow in the suks. The Arabs are just gonna have to learn to deal.

Special Forces operate in very small, mobile, independent units, typically six men per. Because of their small size they have to cross-train very heavily, so that each man in the unit can do every other man's job in a pinch, because they really don't have anyone else on whom they can rely.

When a six-man SF team approaches a 2000-person village needing food, information or shelter, or with the plan to befriend, arm, train and lead the villagers as a counterinsurgency force, they damn well *do* have to learn to kowtow and to get along effectively. Offending the villagers will at the very least compromise their mission and it could get them all dead.

This sort of education isn't about political correctness, it's as coldly practical as weapons training.

(I speak from moderate knowledge; I was a member of Charlie company, 19th SF Group, Utah Army National Guard, for my last year of high school. I moved to the Air Force because I realized the amount of training I would have had to do for my SF job (26 months) was more than I was willing to invest in a part-time job. That plus the fact that there were some seriously scary people in my unit, and I didn't want to end up like them.)