Virtual Arabic

According to this article in the NYTimes today, USC is developing a virtual video game to train Special Forces soldiers to speak Arabic:

No one is going to be able to read Omar Khayyam after this training, but the agency hopes it will enable soldiers to navigate more easily and safely through the Arab world. In its current version, the game teaches Lebanese Arabic. The U.S.C. team is also working on an Iraqi Arabic version. Darpa hopes to have at least some preliminary version to the military by the fall, Dr. Chatham said.

Dr. Johnson, a linguist and an artificial intelligence expert, noted that for English speakers, Arabic is a relatively difficult language, containing sounds that they find hard to distinguish. Moreover, Arabic dialects differ considerably by region.

"People who are taught literary Arabic typically have a lot of difficulty on the street," he said.

That last line made me chuckle. It is all too true and rarely does anyone bother telling you that while you are trying to learn Arabic. Once just for the hell of it I got into a cab in Cairo and asked the driver in Fusha (formal literary Arabic) to take me somewhere. I may as well have spoken Mandarin as he just looked at me as though I had not spoken at all. I don't know what he was thinking, but I had to repeat my request in the local Arabic dialect in order to get where I was going.

One other part of this article was of particular interest:

Communicating is not just about uttering the right words, Dr. Johnson said. It also involves a huge amount of nonverbal interaction. The Tactical Language Project was born of Darpa's realization that in addition to basic vocabulary soldiers in foreign countries also need to understand basic cultural and gestural cues. Dr. Chatham tells the story of a soldier in Afghanistan, soon after the start of war there: soldiers in his unit came to a village and realized that not only did they not understand a word being spoken, they could not interpret people's nonverbal cues.

That must have been really strange. Obviously we take such things for granted in our everyday lives, and travelers (as opposed to tourists) learn to tune in to such differences, but it must be startling to suddenly discover that you are really adrift and bereft of even the most basic means of figuring out what the hell is going on. Figure in the military context and you have a potential recipe for disaster. But the folks in the computer lab are working on it; soon the whole world will be safe for our military excursions. Inshallah.