Education: New Road to Mandalay

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One quarter of the known Burmese population of the U.S. was at Yale last week. His name is Shwe Waing (rhymes with May Wine) and he was making noises with his brown face at U.S. soldier students. The noises were Burmese words. After twelve weeks of them at 15 hours weekly, the soldiers could make them too.

Maung (Mr.) Shwe Waing is a fine example of what may well prove to be a revolution in language teaching. What Yale is doing with Burmese, Malayan, Japanese, Chinese and—most popular of all—Russian, is being done in pretty much the same way with other tongues elsewhere: University of California (Thai, Annamese), Pennsylvania (Moroccan Arabic, Hausa, Fanti) Indiana (Turkish). Noise Guide. Charming, handsome Shwe Waing was a sailor; his home port was Rangoon, where once a soothsayer said he would become a teacher. Last spring Yale picked him off Ellis Island. Technically Shwe Waing is no teacher but a guide through the jungle of Burmese vocables. Every morning for an hour he produces them as ordered by Yale's William S. Cornyn, a Hnguistician (not a linguist, or talker of particular languages, but a student of the universal nature of all languages). Cornyn explains to the soldiers how to use their speech organs to reproduce even the most baffling of the Shwe Waing sound effects. He gives his students the meanings of a few words, shows them how to get grammar piecemeal by building it up from the speech forms they are using.

Each afternoon the boys have two hours with Shwe Waing, who is forbidden to theorize or explain. He just makes noises along lines laid down by Cornyn. The students talk back. If the back talk rings false, Shwe Waing calls for repetition until it sounds right to a Burmese ear. He can explain new words in terms of those already learned. The boys make careful notes of all sound effects in a phonetic alphabet, study them aloud in barrack dormitories, on the street, at meals. Bit by bit, somewhat as Burmese children do, but with the best of technical help, these fighting men master spoken Burmese. Later they can study the alphabet, learn to read.

These soldiers also take a foreign-area course under experts who can give them an understanding of the geographical and cultural character of the area in which Burmese is spoken. Lecturers, seminars, discussion groups, movies are being combined to familiarize the boys with all major aspects of the natural and human scenery of the road to Mandalay. The aim is to equip them so that when they get on that road they will be able to talk sense with the local people in their own tongue.

Mimi-Memo Method. The linguisti-cians' way of teaching is based on the experiences of the Americanists, students of U.S. Indian tribes, who were forced to learn many a tongue which had no written literature. Ancestor of the group was Columbia's late, great ethnologist Franz ("Papa") Boas. He and his greatest linguistic follower, the late Edward Sapir of Yale, could rattle on in Indian tongues which they learned by listening to red men, making phonetic notes, mimicking, memorizing.

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