What was the Defense Language Institute (DLI) like?

I started studying Korean in January 1976 at the Defense Language Institute (DLI) in Monterey, California. I had joined the navy in 1975 with the intention of going to DLI to study Spanish and becoming a Spanish linguist. My recruiter had essentially guaranteed I would be fluent in the language by the time I finished the intensive course there. I started boot camp in October 1975 and sometime near the end of my basic training I got my orders to go to DLI to study “KP,” an abbreviation I did not recognize. “What does ‘KP’ stand for? Shouldn’t it be ‘SP’ for Spanish?” One other guy in my company in boot camp was also going to DLI to study Russian, which showed up on his orders as “RU.” His orders made sense; mine did not. Then it dawned on me: “KP, KP? Oh-no, ‘Kitchen Police’?” Were they really sending me to Monterey to learn to cook and wash dishes there? I must have failed my security clearance. Damn! I shouldn’t have told that guy investigating me that I had experimented with marijuana six or seven times in high school. When he responded, “Experimenting is one or two times, not six or seven,” I should have guessed it. (By the way, don't tell my mom.)

It took a few days, but I finally found out that “KP” stood for “North Korea,” which was almost as bad as Kitchen Police. “North Korea? Where’s that? Don’t they speak Japanese or Chinese over there? You mean I signed up for four years in the navy to learn Korean? Where am I going to use that in Texas? Just wait until I see that recruiter again.”

By the time I fly into Monterey, I have figured out where Korea is and have decided to try to make the best of it. I still do not know anything about the Korean language, though. We are told that instead of the normal 48-week Basic Korean course, we will be the first training group to go through a new 36-week course that will focus on listening instead of the unnecessary skills of reading, writing, and speaking, thereby, saving the government time and money. Wow! Our government people are geniuses, aren’t they?

Sixty people are in my training group, which is divided into three classes with three different Korean instructors. My instructor is an old guy who is originally from North Korea and can barely speak English. The first thing he does on the first day of class is to take a pointer and point to a picture of an animal on a chart. He says its Korean name and tells us to repeat it. After doing that for about a dozen animals, he points again to the first animal, expecting us to remember and say its name. When none of us say anything, he says it again, and we repeat it again. He goes to the next animal and does the same thing. Eventually, some people in the class start to remember some of the animal names, but it is hard for me. I need to see things written down. I need to see an alphabet, learn its sounds, and see the sounds put together to form words. For me, hearing “koggiri” without any visual association is like hearing “blah, blah, blah.” We spend the first hour of our first class playing “listen and repeat,” and I am already hating my teacher.

I do not remember when we finally learn to read and write “hangeul,” but learning it finally gives me some hope. I can now write stuff down and look stuff up in a dictionary. I do not remember learning much grammar. I just remember listening to tape after tape and studying word list after word list without any of it really sticking in my brain. I can make no sense of the language because there is not enough grammar explanation, and the old guy teaching us is a terrible teacher who cannot explain the grammar, anyway. The books for the course are still being written as we are studying, so they are poor quality and not much help.

The other two classes seem to have better teachers because our class is considered the worst of the three, but even people in those classes are dropping out like flies, people who are much better than I am. The classes include people from all the military services. Sailors are encouraged to study by signs on the wall that read, “You Fail, You Sail,” which implies they will send us out to the fleet to chip paint for four years if we fail the course. We finish our course in 32 weeks, 4 weeks early, not because we are ready, but most likely because they had not finished writing the material for the last four weeks.

Out of the 60 people who started in my group, only nineteen graduate, and I am number 19. The only reason I graduate is that I would not give up even though my teachers were telling me I should. After all my begging and pleading, they must have felt sorry for me. So, two-thirds of our group fail a language course that tries to cut corners by teaching just the listening part of the language. We and the group that followed us were the guinea pigs in a failed experiment. After seeing the results of our group and the group that followed, they ended the experiment and went back to their 48-week course that included teaching reading, writing, and speaking. After 32 weeks at DLI, I learned how to look up words in a Korean dictionary and not much else. However, Monterey was beautiful.