No second language no promotion
 

From Soldier Magazine:
SOLDIER SEPT 2014

British Army are to introduce a language requirement for promotion. Daily Telegraph added in its report on this article that from 2018, British Army captains without a second language will not be promotable to major.

Will the RAF (RN, and RM) follow suit? In my experience RAF have always been parsimonious in allocating language training: no established post at end of training = no training. British Army in contrast have always had a more relaxed attitude to such training as a 'broadening' experience, allowing personnel to do such training as a speculative investment.

So, will RAF (and others) follow the Army?

Regards
BATCO

Estuary English?

mange too, mange too Rodney. Should mean some nice work for language tutors near to garrisons. One way to use up the SLC and ELC maybe?

One wonders what the standard would be? A French 'O' level from 30 years ago or the ability to order beer in 7 different languages (the latter the most important for RAF aircrew).

"Mon ami va payer"
"Mein Freund zahlt"
"Mi amigo pagará"

Essential life skills ;-)

Is your proficiency to be checked on a regular basis throughout your career - a language "standards" unit perchance?

After independence, will Scottish count?

What language will be considered? Any, in which case it's pointless, or one that might be pertinent to somewhere one might be deployed.

Not much point in speaking Tagalog if you're going to be deployed to Iraq.

Will the RAF follow en suite? I jolly well hope so....

Back in the days of 1369s, you always had to indicate 'language proficiency', level attained and when it was achieved. So for many years I included 'O' level French, German....and Latin, achieved 1965.

But some oikish wheel opined that this was take the pi$$, so told me that it 'wasn't relevant'. Pratt....:mad:

Not a bad idea to have a second language at conversational level - but is some senior pongo going to decide which languages are acceptable? And how will they assess whether Captain ffanshawe-Smythe's claim to speak fluent Klingon is actually valid?

What about management speak? That's another language in itself!

Having studied Russian, Arabic and Serbo-Croat at University, this actually stifled my promotion in the pilot branch. You have to be 'Above Average' in the air for promotion as a pilot, so when you keep getting pinged off to do 'language' jobs, your flying suffers. I was told by the then Stn Cdr that I had just done an incredible job for a 6-month detachment, but had set my promotion chances back 18-24 months!

I leave next year!

In the 90s, Shrivenham was full of Army officers doing MSc courses to soften the blow of not being selected for ACSC. There was absolutely no medium- long-term return for the Army and, of those I observed at first hand, their educational abilities were severely stretched by a post-graduate degree course. It was an absolute waste of time and money.

Alors, enculez-moi!

One can't help wondering how much difference this might make to the proportion of promotable captains in the first place, also presupposing that we still have a "British" Army in 2018.....:E

Jack
(Admiralty Interpreter)

Which Languages?
 

Capetonian

Soldier magazine says that French and Arabic will be privileged.

Otherwise,

Which Ppruners would not have been admitted to the san ldrs club for lack of a second language?

BATCO declares himself as SLP 3432 in French (pre sqn ldr) and SLP 2222 in Modern Hebrew (albeit post promotion to wg cdr).

Regards
BATCO

I haven't read all of the article.... but has this been imposed by the Ministry of Defence or has this been imposed by the British Army's chain of command?

Yes, Typhoon. Six paragraphs were a bit of a struggle!

I always thought that the military take was "Johnny Foreigner" needs to speak English. Have things changed so much?

I don't believe linguistic training (as proposed in the article) is the same as learning a language. As I understand it the former means that you would be able to name the parts of speech used, the latter would mean being able to communicate in another language.

"
I haven't read all of the article.... but has this been imposed by the Ministry of Defence or has this been imposed by the British Army's chain of command? "

You do understand that the MOD is the same as the British Army don't you? I am sick of people trying to make out that somehow the evil nasty MOD is different from the brave plucky Armed Forces. Please do some basic research in future.