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I understand they have the capability to immerse an individual in a language for six months and have them speaking without accent.

BULL! You can't take an adult, immerse him in a language, and then have him speaking it without an accent in six months. In fact he/she will always have some accent.

I studied French for four years and then went to France for a year of study abroad. Before the classes began, all foreigners were requuired to register for summer language training. It was a way of minimizing the amount of "broken French" spoken by foreign students. Broken French was particularly offensive to University Faculty and Staff.

The process of "relearning" how to speak French was painful in that every word needed repeating until it was spoken to the satisfaction of the instructor. We were not allowed to advance until even basic words were pronounced correctly. The classes were three hours with variable hours of language lab after, usually two to three hours.

At the end of three months we the foreign students were speaking much better and many were told their accents were undetectable.

I can imagine what the DOD would do to someone 24/7 for six months. It is not unreasonable at all to expect they could churn out a language speaker with no detectable accent over a variety of phrases and responses, including cultural gestures such as using one's hands in a provincial manner.

Anyways the point was that the DOD has backup in languages, all languages for translation and the subject article is probably irrelevant insofar as national security. Let's hope so.

BULL! You can't take an adult, immerse him in a language, and then have him speaking it without an accent in six months.

Actually you can, if you take an intelligent person with linguistic aptitude and give him intensive and rigorous training. The Army does this all the time in a specialized base/school in Monterey CA.

I was offered this program, but like a dumbass I chose to go infantry.

BULL! You can't take an adult, immerse him in a language, and then have him speaking it without an accent in six months. In fact he/she will always have some accent.

That is just the cosmetics of the problem. I have been bilingual all my life with Spanish (a relatively trivial language), and am continually amazed and surprised at the errors in meaning that subtle historical meanings of words have with identical roots with English. There's transliteration and translation, and it goes far beyond looking up the words in a dictionary. Subtle shades of differences have major consequences. I can just imagine the difficulties with a language as alien as Arabic, and its hundreds if not thousands of idioms, variants and slang words.

Sir Richard Burton wrote about this over a hundred years ago. He learned Arabic as an adult, along with a number of other different languages, many of them from the Middle East. He was so successful that he traveled with a group of Arabs, stayed in their homes and became one of the few non-Muslims ever to get into the Mecca shrine. His fear was not slipping in his use of the language, but in getting caught taking notes of what he had seen. That was considered western and would have immediately pegged him as such.

You can't take an adult, immerse him in a language, and then have him speaking it without an accent in six months.

That's incorrect. You will learn the language with the accent in which it is taught.

I've heard Swiss, German, Russian, Austrian and even Vietnamese people speaking English (as a second language) with no accent whatsoever. Why? They had American teachers (so actually to a Brit or Aussie, they are speaking with "an American accent").

I've been learning Vietnamese off-and-on for the last 6 years. I'm told that within my limited vocabulary I have no accent at all, although it was a compliment to once have been informed that I have a "southern" accent (which is quite different from the North, like South Boston American English versus New Orleans American English).

And immersion learning will produce dramatic results in 6 months. That is, where you speak, read, and write nothing but the foreign language for 8 to 12 hours per day.

It's not just learning a sufficient vocabulary, a different grammar and reading swirly doodles backwards. And beyond that, it's not just learning to speak without an accent, which as you pointed out is very unlikely.

What really takes time and immersion is learning the hidden and implied meaning of phrases and words placed together. A translator could get every word correct and yet miss an important statement due to lack of knowledge of the culture and colloquialisms.

For example, if you trained a non-English speaker to translate English word for word in 6 months, and he/she translated phrases correctly such as "on the ball" or "under the table" or "light in the loafers", they may miss the whole meaning of the paragraph and toss it as irrelevant nonsense. I'm sure there are many such hidden meanings in Arabic text that go in one shredder and out the other.

My son-in-law is going to that school. He shared a few words with me--sounds good--and that's only after 6 weeks. I think he can do it.

He already speaks Portuguese (sp) and Spanish. He is now learning Serbo-Croatian with some Russian. We are proud of him. You can't just say you want to be a linguist and be accepted. From what I understand, the training is intense, and not everybody sticks with it.

I was 19 (once long ago) and went to a language school in Norway for 4 (maybe 6 weeks). Afterwards I went hiking. Was buying some snacks at one of the mountain huts (ordering in Norwegian). The gal asked me what kind of chocolate bar I wanted, but I couldn't understand her (all I knew in Norwegian was "chocolate bar"!), so I asked her if she spoke English. She said, "Are you a Norwegian that speaks English"? I said no - I'm an American that speaks some Norwegian. I imagine growing up in Minnesota helped with the accent! Don't know if I'd want to risk my life as a spy on only 6 months of training though.