The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2005

next post and find it harder and harder to motivate yourself to study, thus creating a Catch-22 situation: as you study less, you do worse; as you do worse, you study less. While some people find language learning a joy and a Foreign Service perk, others will always find it a long, hard slog. But there are ways of making it through and actually using and loving the language. Well, OK, lik- ing the language. Some Simple Rules First and foremost, realize that you are not alone. Although you hear stories of FSOs who get a 3/3 in French in just six weeks or sailed through Arabic with- out ever cracking a book, these people are rare. Most students work long and hard — they just don’t talk about it much in our hypercompetitive State atmos- phere. Find out right away what kind of language learner you are and base all your study and as much classroom time as possible around that method. Does writing different word endings in different colors make the ideas stick? Then buy your teacher a set of markers. Does reading out loud make things sink in? Then start talking. And asking. If verbalizing things is your strong point, ask questions every day so you hear and internalize the answer. One student bought poster- board, wrote down everything she had trouble with, and taped the posters to her apartment walls. The act of writing out the rules and examples, combined with F O C U S 50 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / J U LY- A U G U S T 2 0 0 5 Robin Holzhauer has worked with the United States Information Agency and the Department of State since 1998 and completed tours in Russia and Kosovo and at the Naval War College. She currently coordinates pub- lic diplomacy training courses at the Foreign Service Institute. Upon being assigned to Russian-language training, she hoped to discover a latent talent for lan- guage learning. She didn’t. However, following these tips made her second language-learning experience, in Albanian, less frustrating.