How Good is the MTC at Teaching Foreign Languages?

[Moksha]

I wonder what Consiglieri and Shades thought of the MTC's approach to a really hard language like Japanese?

[Fence Sitter]

Interesting! When was he in the MTC?

I have a hypothesis that because of MTC culture, they are reluctant to make very many changes or updates to how they teach languages. I'd love to be proven wrong on that, though.

It has been 20 years since he was in the MTC.

[Dr. Shades]

I wonder what Consiglieri and Shades thought of the MTC's approach to a really hard language like Japanese?

I had nothing else to compare it to.

[Analytics]

https://www.newsweek.com/cias-next-generation-200766

WASP from Yale used to be considered the ideal spy for the old-boy network of the CIA. Now agency recruiters jump at the chance to snare a Mormon. Young Mormons tend to have squeaky-clean backgrounds and, thanks to their work as Third World missionaries, they often have a skill the CIA desperately needs these days: knowledge of a foreign language.

Makes perfect sense. It wouldn't surprise me if the CIA had an interest in the Church's training methods in addition to plucking RMs with field experience. Now, was the CIA envious of MTC missionaries who were learning languages so much faster than their guys were? How would anybody know how the MTC training compared to the CIA's training? That's where my money is on the embellishment.

I can see CIA officials saying, "hey look at the Mormons training these kids by the thousands. We ought to check out their program and see how they do it." Why not? In addition to checking out language programs at high schools and colleges.

My guess, like yours, is that it was never very good and that it still sucks, unless they've simply adopted the program you're talking about. And that's because it didn't need to be. The cost of feeding and boarding a missionary in Provo vs. kicking their but into the sticks of South America is greater, no doubt, why not just let them suffer there in poverty sooner rather than later where they'll be hearing the language around them all the time and will pick up enough to get by.

If the CIA needed a mind-blowing language consultant, they should get with the KGB who produced all those spies who integrated into America seamlessly right off the plane.

Exactly. Duolingo has PhD learning scientists who study how people learn and work on continuously improving their programs so they are optimally effective. Do you think the MTC has any PhD learning scientists trying to optimize how they do things? Probably not. Likewise, they probably don't go to the CIA or the Defense Language Institute and ask for pointers there, either. I suspect they just teach the way they always have out of a mixture of momentum, tradition, an army of amateur instructors who don't know any better, and hubris.

Their methods are good enough a lot of people, and missionaries eventually learn the language anyway after being immersed in the foreign country. But man, it was a waste of time for me.

[High Spy]

My two big complaints about how the MTC taught Spanish is that it was most fundamentally based on rote memorization for vocabulary, and then a grammar-theory-first approach to putting sentences together. For example, if I wanted to say, "the book is blue", I'd first have to study lists of vocabulary words that included the words "el", "libro", "ser", and "azul", and would then learn how the English word "to be" can be translated as either the Spanish verb "ser" or "estar" depending on the context, because "to be" actually means two different things. I'd then figure out how to choose "ser" as the correct verb, and then chose one of 42 versions of irregular conjugations based on 6 persons (first, second, third person, by singular or plural) and then one of seven tenses (present, imperfect, preterite, future, subjunctive, imperative, conditional). Once I knew that, I could choose the correct conjugation of ser and would know how to write the word, and would then use the rules on pronunciation they gave to translate the word into sounds, which I would then say. It was a completely unnatural approach--they were teaching us a language as if they were programming a computer.

In contrast, Duolingo ...

Has language training improved in Provo since I was there?

Interesting, spy wonders what MTC folks think of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBOG4Sixoms.