ARABIC: DIFFICULT. Long-time readers of my other blog, American Footprints, may know that I spent the last year and some change in Cairo, Egypt, learning Arabic. So it is with some first-hand experience that I approach Matt Yglesias' observation that "the severe paucity of people who speak Arabic (to say nothing of Farsi, Pashto, etc.) is incredibly crippling to a whole range of military, diplomatic, intelligence, and law enforcement endeavors." Yes, it's true that the U.S. -- and especially the FBI--suffers greatly from its lack of Arabic speakers, but solving the problem is by no means as simple as boosting funding. Arabic, both the Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) that they speak on Al-Jazeera and the different dialects used on the street in each Arab country, is really, really hard. I say this as someone who typically does well with languages. The American University in Cairo, where I was studying, hosts the Center for Arabic Study Abroad (CASA), thought by many to be the best year-long intensive Arabic program in the world. It's very selective, and students who are accepted tend to have had a minimum of two years of serious Arabic beforehand. At the end of the program, most of the thirty-some students scored between a 3.7 and a 4.4 on the FSI scale of oral proficiency in MSA. A 4 is considered "full professional proficiency" and a 5 is considered "native or bilingual proficiency." The U.S. government doesn't have very many 4s and 5s. Even the best Arabic speakers coming out of CASA, however, would not be likely to understand a native Iraqi speaking Iraqi Colloquial Arabic, and especially not two Iraqis speaking to each other. Some, but by no means all, of the CASA students develop impressive skills at the Egyptian dialect, but that is through drilling vocabulary for hours and hanging out with Egyptians as much as possible. One especially hardcore student, who scored highest with a 4.6, even lived in a poorer neighborhood for a year and a half to ensure that he was always around people who didn't speak English. But he was a special case. He's now in journalism school, but if he ever wanted to work for the government his background check would be a doozy. Contractors like L-3 are less picky, but very few of the mostly academic types who go to CASA or similar programs are going to be willing to risk their lives in Iraq. 648 153 linguists working for contractors have been killed in Iraq since 2003. Outside of the dangerous world of translating in Iraq, the incentives for investing the amount of time and energy it takes to become a 4.6 are not so hot either.
--Blake Hounshell
