You want to know how I did it? This is how I did it, Anton: I never saved anything for the swim back. — Gattaca
One of the proudest moments of my life was when I graduated from language school in Monterey. Yeah, it’s not the Special Forces Q Course or Ranger School, but I worked my butt off to get that diploma.
But it almost didn’t happen.
About six weeks into the course, I found something better to do. OK, I found myself with a girlfriend, and watching the moon rise at Lover’s Point was a heck of a lot more fun than sitting in my room and practicing conjugation.
Six weeks after that, I failed a big test. That earned me a very quick, very frank conversation with the head instructor. Either pull my head out of my butt and get back to work, or look forward to a different career field. Getting let go from the school for lack of effort was a guarantee that I wouldn’t be given a second chance or be sent to one of the non-linguist careers in Intelligence.
So I knuckled down. I was up early to study, exercised while listening to tapes, and probably drove my roommates crazy by staying up until all hours of the night to practice vocabulary.
But it worked.
I aced every test after that. I still had a great time during the weekends and such, but Sunday nights always found me at my desk with headphones on and a book in front of me.
If you’re not willing to give maximum effort to something, you’re not willing to succeed. I’m not saying you have to be obsessive about it, but you do have to do more than show up and waste oxygen.
DaddyBear’s Den 
D.W. Drang
/ July 3, 2014For the benefit of anyone not familiar with the Defense Language Institute — and especially for those who weren’t military linguists and made jokes about “Monterey Marys” — the only thing that keeps the wash-out rate form being astronomical is the number of students who spoke the language in the home growing up, but need to be taught to read and write it, and formal grammar. The fewer native speakers in the class, the higher the failure rate. My Korean Basic Course class graduated (IIRC) 12 out of a total of 33 students.
A Basic Spanish Course might graduate everyone, and then when they go one for advanced training wash them all out because they never developed good study habits, and couldn’t learn the military-related and technical skills. (Saw it happen; also saw the first Basic Spanish class at Goodfellow AFB that had a 100% graduation rate: No native speakers. Coincidence? The cadre didn’t think so.)
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daddybear71
/ July 3, 2014My class had a failure rate of between 35 and 40 percent of the original students, but we had a lot of those wash into other classes for a second try, and we got quite a few wash into our class for their second try. We had about 125 start with us, and we graduated about 85 or so, IIRC. A little more than half of those were with me when the Sergeant Major told us to look left, look right, and decide if we were going to be the one out of three that didn’t finish at all.
And yes, everything was about study habits. We lost someone who had taken Russian for four years in college because she didn’t get into the groove early when we were going over what she had learned already (her four years was good for about 1/4 of the year we spent at Monterey). It’s like anything else in that talent alone isn’t good enough.
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