Do any of you good folks know or have any notions of what language "programming" TSCC uses to teach people a foreign language who are about to go on a mission?

I remember hearing stories of it being some magical thing that imprinted/translated a language into someone's head within 6 months.

I'm curious to know now as a recovered survivor of the self righteous reich, who wants to travel the world & is actively working on my 2nd & 3rd language ;)

"Everything we do is trying to learn by and with the Spirit, so that's really the only way you can ... stand it here," says Benjamin Simpson.

This is the most truthful answer I can find. HA!

It's nothing spectacular. Especially for uncommon languages.

You get a phrase book and work book that contain some very church-centric phrases. You typically receive a dictionary as well, which is generally more useful, because it has all the regular everyday words that you'd actually need.

A few times a week you get to use the computer system. It looked much better for the common languages (Spanish, German, French, etc), but was basically useless for me. It wasn't more than fancy flash cards that could speak the words to you. Again, only church words and phrases.

I was told to memorize twenty words a day, but there really wasn't time for that. "Do it during gym and at meal times" was what my teacher said.

Then there were speak-your-language (SYL) days where we were supposed to only speak our mission language. This resulted in a lot of grunts and physical gestures since we didn't know how to say things like, "please pass the napkins". We could say we knew Joseph was a prophet of God though. Useful, huh?

I started to get tired of the SYL days, and my companions would disapprove of me resorting to English. So I would curse at my companions in German. We were learning Albanian, so they didn't pick up on it.

You don't really learn the language until you're out of the MTC.

It's all repetition and immersion into the language.

The MTC give you a crash course in whatever language but what really makes the difference is being forced to talk to people in another language and listen to it all the time.

I have friends who have come to the US to learn English, only to go to English classes and hang out with people of their country and speak their native tongue outside of class. They never got good at English.

I have friends who studied abroad and only hung out with other foreign exchange students. They never got good at learning the other language because they didn't practice with natives very much. they just stayed in their comfort zone the whole time.

I served a mission and learned 3 languages. It's all about studying the language, practicing with natives, and not being afraid to make mistakes. You also need to find people who have the patience to help you with the language. I served in a country where if they could tell you sucked at the language, they just reverted to English. Super annoying.

When I went,1958, there was no training that I recall. I already spoke Spanish and English. That is probably why I was sent to So America.

Several of my companions arrived at the mission home completely ignorant of the language. They had a rough first 6 months.

The church has long bragged (put out the faith promoting rumors) that there was something special or divine about their language training program.

They used to say that the FBI and CIA were studying the church's system because it was so effective.

The only thing effective about it is that they force it on young, absorbent minds.

Language is a skill best learned in your youth, and the younger the better.

Age, not the system, is key...with immersion (in the language, not the baptismal font).

You can be fairly certain the church didn't invent their program.

I have a friend from Brazil who served his mission in Nagoya, Japan about 10 years ago. He never learned japanese other than a few key words, but he was able to improve his english since all of his companions and his MP were americans. The only people he taught were americans and brazilians living there and that by chance crossed his path.

And no, he's not mentally retarded. It's just that the language system didn't work for him.

Thats just as I suspected! Bogus, leaving the young people to the wolves.....
I've found that the Pimsleur program is the best one out there, next to direct immersion.

I haven't seen the language curriculum recently but in earlier times I know that the MTC maintained pretty close ties with language acquisition specialists at BYU (and employed many language students as teachers).

TSCC gets very invested in certain approaches so I doubt that the materials are cutting edge (which these days would mean a lot of task-based interaction with the language in settings replicating real-life exchanges to the extent possible in a classroom setting).

When it comes right down to it, any method will work at its best when the students are motivated and missionaries tend to be among the most motivated--either because they want to hand out the kool-aid in the best way possible once they reach their country or because they know they're about to get dumped off someplace where they have to fend for themselves for 2 years in a different language.

Back in the time of the Six Discussions, and the LTM, the system worked very well because we spent our three months memorizing all the discussions. Since we knew them in English, it gave us a solid foundation from which to work. Spending all day with an instructor, and then 'presenting' the discussions to Spanish-speaker, we'd build up more and more supporting verbs, nouns and adjectives. So to me, it seemed like total immersion built on the discussions foundation.

But two things I never learned: how to flirt like a native and how to curse like a native.

I did learn how to speak 'down' or colloquially, from reading comic books, principally Los SuperMachos. I collected them and shipped home issues 1 through 130 something. My mom threw them out...

The comics helped me 'see' in print what I was hearing on the street, all the slang and 'lazy' forms of words, like "pos" for pues. I don't know about other countries, but in Mexico rather than say "uh..", Mexicans say "este..." or "este, pos..."