G.I.‘S GAME TO LEARN ARABIC

U.S. Special Forces have a new way of learn­ing Arabic — by play­ing a video game.
Arabic is one of those lan­guages that are par­tic­u­larly hard to mas­ter in a class­room. There’s a whole new alpha­bet to learn. A lot of the syl­la­bles seem the same to American ears. Unlike French or Spanish, there aren’t a whole bunch of words in com­mon with English. And there are a zil­lion dialects that sound a whole lot dif­fer­ent from the Arabic taught in school.
The idea behind the new sim­u­la­tor is to give G.I.s a more real­is­tic learn­ing envi­ron­ment — one in which they only have to learn the lim­ited, “tac­ti­cal” vocab­u­lary they need to oper­ate on the street.
This “Tactical Language Project” — co-​​developed by the University of Southern California and Darpa, the Pentagon’s mad sci­ence divi­sion — first teaches a sol­dier the basics of spo­ken Arabic. The grunt then tries out what he’s learned in a pix­i­lated Lebanese vil­lage. Wearing a head­set, the player talks to the game’s Arabic-​​speaking char­ac­ters. Using arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence and speech recog­ni­tion soft­ware, these dig­i­tized Lebanese guide the G.I. through the lin­guis­tic labyrinth of their native tongue.
The game teaches non­ver­bal cues, too. “For exam­ple,” the New York Times notes, “when [game pro­tag­o­nist] Sergeant Smith starts or fin­ishes a con­ver­sa­tion with an impor­tant per­son, he can cross his right hand over his heart and bow slightly, a com­mon ges­ture of respect in the Arab world.“
Check out footage of the game here.

July 6th, 2004 | Training and Sims | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.