No Spik Swahlli

There are only some 200 Americans in the U.S. who can read & write Japanese; to the best of the Government's knowledge, the U.S. has no one at all who can teach such essential linguistic tools of war as Burmese, Swahili, Malagasy. For its traditional monolingual isolation, the U.S. last week paid with mental toil and sweat.

In a handful of universities, several hundred students were working as many as twelve hours a day on the important war job of learning Asiatic and African languages. For Americans, these languages are tough. It takes at least a year of hard, full-time study to learn to read & write Japanese. Students of some rare languages, lacking textbooks, had to write their own as they studied.

The American Council of Learned Societies, which is in charge of this big job, has found a new popularity. After having spent 15 years and $65,000 in a vain effort to interest Americans in Oriental languages, it now has a new appropriation of $100,000 and some willing students. The Council found 500 missionaries, teachers and businessmen who knew Far Eastern languages, but many had only a speaking acquaintance. So the Council offered scholarships and subsidies to universities to start courses. Its intensive courses have already begun or are scheduled to begin this summer at nine universities (principally at Yale, Harvard, Columbia, Michigan, California). Languages to be taught: Japanese, Chinese, Russian, Arabic, Turkish, Persian, Modern Greek, Icelandic, Malay, Mongol, Hungarian, Portuguese, Siamese, Burmese, Hindustani, Swahili, Dutch.

When students have finished a course, they will be assigned to work on the radio or at the battlefronts.

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