It doesn't matter. You can be a native speaker the Army will still send you to learn a different language. They never do things the easy way.
"It doesn't matter. You can be a native speaker the Army will still send you to learn a different language. They never do things the easy way."
The AF used to be the same way. My first wife was a native German and was sent to learn Vietnamese. In the 90s, the office I was working at provided management oversight to the language program - we were able to get the personnel weenies to see the logic in allowing a person to skip language training if their skills were good enough in a language and go straight to tech school. Likewise, we got them to send people with a background in one language to that same language at DLI.
These language pay programs are problematic. Most of my former colleagues (I'm a retired AF linguist) agree that these programs reward mediocrity in two or more languages over fluency in one. If I understand the new program correctly, what could happen is a linguist who gets a 2/2 in two or more languages will earn more in language pay than the linguist who gets a 3/3/ or higher (now you can test higher with the DLPT V test which is being rolled out) in one language. (Under the current program I was able to get the max $$$ by testing in Russian and Ukrainian - I can barely speak Ukrainian, but the similiarities to Russian make reading and listening a cakewalk. Plus the similiarities in the written tests allowed me to score high on the Ukie DLPT. And, despite traveling frequently throughout Ukraine, I NEVER had to use Ukrainian as Russian is still widely spoken and used. Even though I have near-native fluency in Russian, without the Ukrainian DLPT scores I would have made 100 dollars less a month.)
If the military wanted to get serious about the language program they would work on getting language skills in ONE language higher instead of encouraging mediocre poliglots.