EPTI passed out on the bus ride. When I woke up, we were already on the installation, and riding around the base attempting to show us around.
The first thing I noted was that I seemed to be climbing an everlasting hill. This proved to not be entirely incorrectly, the installation in itself was on the face of a rather steep hill. I eventually broke down the area into 3 different sections.
The top of the hill:
Asian Language schools
Gym/Recreational Center/Football Field/Track (They were all in the same general area)
Chow Hall (one of 2)
Between the top and the middle area:
BX/PX (Whatever you wanna call it, you go shopping and crap here.)
The middle area:
Squadron area (It's where the personel who actually work there work. It's also where you pick up the mail)
Chow Hall (the other one)
Front Gate (leading out to Monterey)
The bottom area:
European Language schools
Church(es? I think there might have been more than 1, I'm not sure)
Outdoor Recreational Center
Field (Used for ceremonies and stuff)
Back Gate (Out to Monterey, it's used less seldomly, if I remember correctly)
That's more or less the layout of the installation. What made this odd compared to Basic was that I discovered that it was run by the Army. It didn't make a difference either way in the end, as all 4 branches were there, all from widly varying ranks (E1 to an 05 I had in my class, and I'm sure there were other higher ranks wandering about too).
When I got off the bus, I remember stepping off into the squadron area and looking about.
Compared to how clean Lackland was (and by clean I mean maintained), the area was more or less... falling apart. It wasn't necessarily shoddy, but I noticed a lot of stuff wasn't aging well. I remember someone walking by and telling me I didn't have to wear the glasses that were issued to me at basic (colloquially called BCGs (Birth Control Glasses, for how hideous they were), and I could wear my civilian glasses. Oh how giddy I was.
Soon an Airman came up with a red rope attatched to his shoulder. I can't remember his name, not important, what was important was that he was our interim leader until we met higher rank. That meant the Blue Rope. The Blue Rope'd person came out and I remember him being rather intimidating.
After getting yelled at so much by someone of 4 or more stripes, I had a certain fear of them. But this particular sergeant threw all those misconceptions out the window by being friendly and helpful. This is likely due to him seeing all the trainees come in and out of basic with the same mindframe, but after signing some things here and there, we moved into the dorm room.
I just remember the dorm being pretty damn small, about the size of a doctor's office. It had barely enough room for a bunk bed and 2 desks. I didn't see my roommate at the time, I assumed he was at class or something. I tossed my stuff in a corner and went on to more briefings and chow.
Chow was a stressful situation back in basic, but it was still looked forward too anyways because the food was halfway decent (after a while), and it was a milestone in the day to signify chunks of the day. It was kinda the same way in Monterey, I went to chow purely to get away from the stresses of class for a bit. And it was stressful, as I would learn soon enough.
After chow, it was some more briefings before they sent us off to details. They put us into the flight of people that just got there, and are still transitioning into the general lifestyle of the installation. I think you spent like 2 weeks in the flight before you're assigned to the flight that your language is assigned to (I think it was broken down into Arabic, Asian Languages, European languages and another flight of everything else. There was also the transition flight, and the flight of prior service members who were retraining into lingustics). Then we were given the rest of the day off.
It was sort of odd. We were told that because we were in Phase 1, we were given restrictions to what we could and couldn't do. Most notably, we couldn't go off base until we hit Phase 2, and even then, we'd have to go off in blues. Also notable was that there was curfew. Not that it mattered to a gamer like me, I stayed in my room a lot anyways.
When we got back to the room, I had no idea what to do with my time. I had not set up internet yet (having been on the ground for what, 6 hours at the time?), did not have a TV and didn't feel like calling anyone. It was Saturday the next day, so there was even less to do, since everyone would scatter on the weekends to do who knows what. So I slept.
I woke up to the sounds of yelling and screaming in the background. My roommate had also woken up and he watched me climb out of bed to the window to look. He mused that people were LARPing. Yes, it was true, people were LARPing behind my dorm. This would not bother me for long, as I moved about 4-5 times while I was there. I ended up moving at the end of the week, just downstairs to the basement area.
I was so exhausted at the time, I didn't even care that they were nerding out, I was more irritated that they were waking me up. However, thinking back, this was the first indication that I was in a place of far greater nerdism than I would have anticipated, and a place of higher intelligence than basic, which I had just gone through.
I spent the next day exploring. The installation was harsh to walk around, due to the steep hills, and the walking distance. I think it took me around half an hour to walk to class when I was halfway through my time there, and 45 minutes or so to walk back up (I believe I had the longest walking distance of any language. And I mean that in all seriousness). It had a bus system, but the times for it come around were rather inconvenient, timing itself to only the class times, so for wandering around during the weekend, it was meh. I walked to the PX/BX and bought some supplies. I tried to setup my internet, so I could get back to my WoW fix, but it was closed on the weekends. Oh, the humanity.
The rest of the weekend was more or less the same. Either sleeping or messing around on the phone. When we got to Monday, we were subjected to more briefings and death by power point for another 3-4 days. Then we were put to details, where we essentially swept and mopped the squadron areas (and dorm areas) ... for a long time. It lasted until we started our class. Thinking back, it was a nice and quiet time. Repetitive, yes, but it was easy work, and I was still getting a steady paycheck.
Somewhere halfway in the week, we were asked by one of our student leaders if we were ready for open ranks inspection. That's when they found out that we weren't allowed to have Irons in our dorm in basic. This mattered because for BDUs, there had to be a certain crease in the sleeves. So instead of cleaning up our dorms (Which we were to do for a couple hours a night, with our doors open to show that we were actually doing it), we had a class on how to iron. ...yeah.
Open ranks was a pain. It was part of a formation we had every morning at 7. I needed a haircut. meh.
Sooner than I would have liked, class started. At the time, all of us transitioning in were all anxious for it, and details were boring as shit. There were small class like things that they provided for us to give us an introduction to the language from people that had been through the program (the people who were injurted and being held over for a recycle were also doing details with us, albiet, administrative paperwork). I honestly tried to pay attention, but it was hard when the individuals teaching us weren't teachers, nor were they proficient in the language yet. It was better than nothing, but it wasn't helping us much.
We were moved to another flight, under new leadership. We eventually met up with our teachers for class. They were all native speakers, and stayed with us through the entire duration, so they got to know us pretty damned well, and vice versa. However, they were unforgiving, and the course was as well.
Aside from all the military BS I had to do (I still had to go to formations every morning, until I was out of the phase program entirely, I also had PT every other day, there were sometimes monthly formations that we had, various holiday things, etc), the class ate up an 8 hour day. This normally isn't a problem because hell, that's a normal school day, with a normal school setup.
Bluntly, this is what I did for most of the time (90%) I was there. Go to breakfast. To to class for about an hour. Break. Go to class for about an hour. Break. Go to class for about an hour. Lunch. Go to class for about an hour. Break. Go to class for about an hour. Go home and do about 3-4 hours of homework, in addition to cleaning the dorm for inspection.
And that's about it. There were quizzes every week, and every month or so would be a chapter test. New Vocab was given every couple of days for us to remember. To put it bluntly, it was a blitz to get us to pass the test at the end of the course (the DLPT, Defense Language Proficiency Test) and the instructors were teaching at a blazing pace. My course was a year long. At least Russian has Latin roots and therefore, it had cognates in which I could at least understand parts of the sentence going in. I couldn't imagine learning an Asian language without some sort of background going in.
Some people might say that if they could deal with high school, they can deal with this. What made high school different, in terms of study habits is that your classes changed every period. In DLI, you took a languge course for 8 hours a day. The topics might be varied, but the subject matter is still the language. You might learn grammar one class, focus on vocab in another, and focus on current events in the languages native area. Then there's speaking, which is another monster in itself when you don't know what you're talking about since you barely learned the word 2 days ago.
What screwed a lot of people up with speaking is the inability to make shit up. As I know I did, a lot of my class was asking "How do you say ______?", when the correct answer was, make shit up, no one cares if you really did work in a library or not, for the purposes of learning, you did. I had this issue throughout the course until about halfway through, when it clicked for me.
Like I stated above, classes had a variety of rank in the class, which is odd, considering how normal tech schools tend to have their own officer section. In this class, I was learning with an O5, an O3, 2 E6s, an E5, and the rest of us measly E3s were cleaning up the rest of the class for a grand total of.... 20.
Class was essentially focused on speaking, reading, and listening, as that's what the DLPT's sections broke down into. To do the listening part, we would all go into a lab like setting, with computers connected to headphones, giving us prompts to listen in on, and we would answer questions on it. I remember these labs fairly well, for several reasons.
IT WAS FAST AS FUCK. Numbers were big in these labs, and trying to register what the hell they said (because they spoke fast as shit), remember what that was in English, and writing it down, I ended up skipping a lot of shit simply because I was 5 numbers behind, and I had to catch up. Even listening to the news was hard as hell. And it only got worse as the course went on, when they started throwing in slang and shortforms of numbers (like how we say Double O for 00, or Quarter to 4 for 3:45, that kinda stuff).
Also, I found out my instructors were completely inept with computers going in. I ended up trying to help them out and they let me work with the computers for about half of the class, until the dean of the area came by and found out a student was using instructor equipment (regardless of whether or not they wanted me to, it wasn't allowed, lol). At the end of the course, they called me their computer savior (It was some technical blunder where they kept putting the programs in the wrong location or something like that). I was totally just surfing the web the entire class on the second monitor, where no one could see, the entire lab. lol.
There was a mock immersion, where they took us to a site to pretend we're in Russia for a couple days. It was fairly interesting, we were technically not allowed to speak English while we were there, but that didn't happen anyways. They took us through various scenarios, stuff like ordering food from a restaurant, buying tickets to a movie, and describing objects that we had just seen (it was a scene from a movie, that was kinda hard), as well as eating some of the native foods there (Borsch is pretty terrible, btw).
The entire course they held recycle over our head. Just like in basic, some people came, and some people went. Some classes graduated with half of their original class in the end, with only half of them even passing the course. It wasn't hard to get recycled, it was as simple as not keeping up with the work and tanking X amount of tests (It varied from each instructor team). This was in addition to a lot of the military crap they held over our heads to make for double the punishment. Oh yay.
There was also a true blue immersion. It was a 2 week (I think) trip to the actual country. Only the top half of the class could go. We couldn't actually go to Russia itself, so the people that did go ended up going to Kiev, Ukraine. According to the people that did go (so, obvioulsy, I didn't), it was difficult, because the instructors back at DLI at least spoke English, and understood the US culture. Not the instructors there. If you didn't know a word, and was trying to describe it, but failing, you're screwed. However, a sergeant in my class was telling me that he spent about 20 minutes trying to figure out a loop around way to say test drive, before the guy he was talking to was like "Oh, oh! Test drive, da?" /facepalm.
This more or less was class. Words can't really sufficiently describe how difficult it actually was, despite all the extra effort the instructors put into us, and the extra study time we were given, it was extremely hard to study (and stay motivated). On top of that, there were other things going on in our lives outside of class, or military that we were balancing.
When Phase 3 hit us, it was essentially smooth sailing, more or less, in terms of military stuff. We were allowed to go off base in civilian clothes (the first time we could wear them outside our dorm room since basic), we were given a much later curfew (like midnight, as opposed to 10, or something), and we were dormed in much larger dorms. Being able to go off base was a change for me, and it affected me pretty strangely.
When I first got there, I got my internet installed pretty much immediately (I had to pay, but who cares), to play WoW. At the time, vanilla was ending, and Burning Crusade came out. That was an experience in itself. Not only that, but I was playing Magic at the time as well. I found out pretty soon that there was an FNM location about 30m away from the installation, walking. I found a few players that were military, and I spent a good chunk of my weekend either deckbuilding or grinding shit online. I geeked out like a madman there. I also was playing console games on the side, with my roommate, whom I still keep in contact with. Good times. However, this would be a contributing factor to the end result in my DLPT.
After a lot of stressful times, we reached the DLPT date. I was surprised I hadn't been recycled yet. I floated about the middle of the class, but I didn't see myself doing that well at all. At about the middle point, I got my act together, and started to study a good amount more. Was it enough? Probably not. DLI is one of those places that if you fall behind, it's hard as hell to catch up.
The categories you tested on were Speaking, Listening, and Reading. Each category is self explanatory. The Speaking test I felt the weakest on, as I'm naturally a quiet guy, I had inhibitions about it. I went int, gave my spheal by answering their questions, and went about on my way. The next day was the Listening and Reading test back to back. The military required a 1+ in speaking, a 2 in listening and a 2 in reading. A week later, results were posted. We were back on details in the meantime. I got a 1+/1/1.
I was petrified. I had passed speaking, what I thought was my worse subject, but failed the other subjects. I went back to my dorm and stared at the ceiling. I had never failed anything quite to this magnitude in my life. Failing tests in high school is one thing- you can buffer your score and still pass the class. This was completely different. I had no idea what was gonna happen to me.
Out of the class of 20 we started with... 8 passed.
