The Foreign Service Journal, October 2006

duties. I can think of no other skill more essential to our work. Yet too often we get to the 3/3 speaking/reading level, and stop there. I speak — perhaps spoke is more precise — Spanish and Italian at the 4-level and Greek at a 3. The practical gap between those grades is gargan- tuan. In the first two languages, I could do television and radio interviews, talk from notes and answer questions in seminars and conferences, and skim the papers for relevant arti- cles. But in Greek, I could only carry on a simple con- versation and get through newspaper editorials with a dictionary at hand. I may have been able to answer most questions, but I could not shade my meaning or convey subtlety in my responses. I certainly would not have dared to do live interviews for radio or attempted to exchange serious opinions with an informed audience in the language. The fault was mine, not FSI’s. I left language train- ing with a 3/3 and the expectation that I would get bet- ter in Greek through regular use. But I quickly learned in Athens that my FSN staff and the journalists, politi- cians and academicians I regularly talked to spoke English far better than I spoke Greek. Although I used it with people in stores and restaurants and on official calls in the provinces, and even though I was dutiful in attempting to read the local papers, Greek was hard and the demands of the job were many. I got lazy. When I left the country after three years I had barely improved at all. A few of my colleagues did better, but most resembled me more than a fluent speaker. I have discussed this with many other officers who have stud- ied Arabic, Korean, Japanese and Chinese, and again, many of them simply never got much beyond their FSI score. Perhaps it is now time for the department, which pays a bonus to those who speak a hard language at the 3/3 level, to test officers annually. If someone slips below a 3, he or she loses the additional income. As a further inducement, the pay differential between 3 and 4 should be increased. This would encourage officers to use the language and improve their facility in it. It might also persuade them to return for repeat tours. As it stands now, too often the department spends two years educating officers in a language — Korean comes especially to mind — yet after spending three years in the country, they never go back. … And Having Something to Say State might also want to reconsider its requirement that officers have two geographic areas of expertise. If someone makes the effort to learn Arabic to the 4-level, then that person should be able to serve exclusively in the Arab world. After all, it is the lingua franca, so to speak, in almost 20 diverse coun- tries, from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean. Similarly, learning one Slavic language helps with another, and each Slavic country offers different chal- lenges, so why shouldn’t an officer spend a career in Central and Eastern Europe? Just speaking the language, of course, is not enough. As Alaister Cooke once said, he had a friend who spoke six languages perfectly but never uttered an intelligent word in any of them. No one would accuse our officers of that, but we could all use some help. Yes, several ses- sions dedicated to giving an interview, responding to the press, writing a speech and speaking in public should be mandatory for all officers, but FSI should go beyond training to education. It should also offer a version of area studies focusing on the United States. We might like to think it’s otherwise, but many officers have for- gotten much of what they learned in college about American culture, law, history, literature and art. Public diplomacy must address these subjects as well as foreign policy. Most of us would welcome a refresher course on America’s seminal documents — the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution — and the Supreme Court decisions that changed our history. I would think that many of us would seize the opportuni- ty to study again, even briefly, the great speeches of Washington, Lincoln, Roosevelt, Kennedy and King and their implications for our country. And should anyone be sent abroad to represent America who cannot discuss Puritanism, Mark Twain and the civil rights movement? F O C U S 36 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / O C T O B E R 2 0 0 6 Should anyone be sent abroad to represent America who cannot discuss Puritanism, Mark Twain and the civil rights movement?