Linguistic Quickstep

The Army taught thousands of G.I.s-to speak foreign languages--even "unspeakable" ones like Thai. Its secret weapon was a phonograph with made-to-order records. Old-style language teachers scoffed at the Army method, even after the Army method worked. It wasn't the records that brought results; they claimed; it was the intensive, purposeful way the G.I.s studied, and the small-size classes they studied in. But when the Army released the records for civilian use, educators were among those who scrambled to buy them.

Last week 225 colleges and 300 schools were experimenting with the Army's records in language classes. Cornell was already convinced, now uses the Army method exclusively to teach seven languages. In groups of ten, Cornell students listen to the records until they are blue in the face; they put in 120 such "contact-hours" a semester. Cornell figures that new-method undergrads cover twice as much linguistic ground as by old methods.

Twenty-eight Tongues. Developed for the Army by the non-profit Linguistic Society of America, the records (and accompanying texts) are distributed by Book Publishers Henry Holt & Co. A set costs $50, whether French or Hindustani; mass sales of the Big Four (Spanish, French, German, Russian) make up losses on more exotic items. Royalties go to the Linguistic Society, which last week was planning the conquest of eight more languages to add to the 20* originally ordered by the Army.

Made of unbreakable Vinylite, the Holt-Army records give four hours of instruction on 44 sides--against one hour and 52 minutes for its long-established competitor, Linguaphone. The Army's 1,200-word vocabulary is commonplace instead of cultural, concentrates on such workaday problems as ordering a meal, seeing the sights, locating the washroom.

Holt calls the teaching method "guided imitation": immediately after the native speaker does his stuff, there is dead track so the student can repeat aloud. Words are taught in progressively larger learning blocks ("I want," "I want a glass," "I want a glass of water"). In this way the student masters speech melody (intonation and speed) as well as vocabulary. By following the text as he plays the record, the student learns to read, too. But the real goal is speaking ability.

English by Smith. Each foreign tongue is spoken by a different native voice, but the English on all the records is the voice of Henry Lee Smith Jr. Gabby, chubby Smith, 33, was the top Army man in developing the records, now heads the State Department's language school in Washington. With the aid of his own records, he has on occasion taught ten foreign languages he-himself cannot speak.

Before the war, Smith taught at Columbia and Brown, also starred on a radio show called Where Are You From (TIME, May 6, 1940). Like Shaw's Professor Higgins in Pygmalion, Linguistic Scientist Smith told strangers in his audience where they hailed from by the way they talked. His batting average: a respectable 80%. He made them pronounce such shibboleths as Mary, marry, merry (people from west of the Appalachians make no distinction), and wash, water, Washington. Smith's most notable failure: his wartime insistence that Lord Haw-Haw could not be William Joyce (he was). Smith thought Joyce pronounced longer, hunger and German like a German-American, not an Irish-American.

*Chinese, Japanese, Burmese, Malay, Korean, Thai, Turkish, Hindustani, German, Dutch, Danish, Norwegian, Russian, Hungarian, Serbo-Croatian, Greek, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian.

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