Last week, as we passed the one-third mark of the course, I was reminded of the roller coaster ride that is FSI language learning. One day, it feels as though you can’t comprehend a single word being said. The next, you’re gradually piecing together structures and vocabulary to craft complex, sequential sentences you couldn’t have managed just a week or two earlier. But just as you start to feel a sense of accomplishment, you open your mouth to speak, only to have your mind go completely blank—like a computer freezing on the dreaded blue screen of death.
Tag: FSI
Not on the Tip of My Tongue: Learning Burmese, Weeks 13-14
The cadence of the past two weeks has been unusually choppy, with several language classes disrupted by the Thanksgiving federal holiday, Area Studies, and an untimely bout of illness. These interruptions have contributed to my feeling lately that I can’t think of much to say in Burmese.
New Dynamics: Learning Burmese, Week 12
In week 11 we reached a milestone, completing the first quarter of our Burmese language course. The following week (week 12) marked a turning point of its own as our two classes merged into one for the first time.
First Progress Evaluation: Learning Burmese, Week 9
Last Friday marked a date I’d circled on the calendar during September’s first week of Burmese class: November 1st, our initial Burmese speaking and reading progress evaluation.
Pivoting As Needed: Learning Burmese, Weeks 5-6
Over the past two weeks of studying Burmese, I’ve made a deliberate effort to increase my study time. A slump in week five made me realize the importance of establishing a more consistent and intentional study routine.
Suggested Tips for Language Study at FSI
Last month, I attended a seminar on study tips offered to current language students by the Foreign Service Institute’s (FSI) School of Language Studies (SLS). At any given point, hundreds of Foreign Service Officers are engaged in long-term language training at FSI. Successfully reaching the required scores for our overseas language-designated onward assignments is “the why.”
I’ve aggregated here some of my favorite language study tips from SLS consultants, fellow students, and my own experience. I’ve categorized them into two groups: strategy (what you do) and mindset (how you approach what you do), though the division is probably subjective. If you have a favorite tip for succeeding in FSI language study, feel free to add it in the comments!
Hamster Wheel: Learning Burmese, Week 4
Last week, we finished week four of the Burmese language course. We’re just one-eleventh of the way through (ha!), but I’m already acutely aware of the hamster wheel I’m running on.
Building a Foundation: Learning Burmese, Weeks 2-3
Week three of my 44-week Burmese class is drawing to a close. In this short time, we’ve progressed from hand-drawing consonants to reading strings of script, sounding out words we don’t know like kindergarteners. We’ve even written some little paragraphs on easy topics.
Into a Bigger Bowl: Learning Burmese, Week 1
Last Tuesday – after the Labor Day holiday – over 650 shiny new students with language-designated onward positions arrived at the Foreign Service Institute to begin language training. I was one of them.
But Who’s Counting?
Last week marked the eighth consecutive week of summer tradecraft training that bridged the end of my tour in Children’s Issues to the start of Burmese language studies. It also marked the final week.
Back to School
I’ve just completed my first three weeks of Rangoon pre-departure training at the Foreign Service Institute (FSI). The one-week courses were for mid-level consular managers and covered fraud and malfeasance (PC541), immigrant and nonimmigrant visas, (PC557), and American Citizens Services matters like crisis management and citizenship (PC558).
The Storm Before the Calm?
In mid-June, as I finished my fourth tour, my husband V and I took a quick weekend trip to South Carolina. The occasion was an engagement party for my eldest stepdaughter A, who in April had become engaged to her longtime partner B. The following weekend, seizing likely my last opportunity for the foreseeable future to visit the west coast, I flew out and spent two weeks with my parents. I’d worked out the leave before my training schedule began in earnest by offering to stay in Children’s Issues an extra six weeks to cover a staffing gap, provided I could take time off at the end.
The subtext of both trips felt a little “last hurrah.” Obviously not in the sense I wouldn’t see family again, but because I was preparing to buckle down into more than a year of full-time, in-person pre-departure training at the Foreign Service Institute. Taking leave during training usually isn’t feasible, particularly as I was starting the first couple months of my schedule with a series of short classes I needed to attend each day of. Unless I potentially tacked leave on to Christmas when FSI was closed or a rest stop during my PCS to Asia itself, outside of holiday weekends I would be unlikely to get back to the west coast before heading to my next tour in Burma.
I had envisioned my recent travels as vacation and relaxing family time, but predictably, they passed in a blur. While I was still the master of my own schedule and had a lot of fun, the past month didn’t exactly feel like down time. As my flexibility to be outside of Washington dwindled, I wondered if my trips were the calm before the storm, or the storm before the calm.
Zero Miles Later
Yesterday I ended my fourth tour in the Office of Children’s Issues. And as I’ve mentioned recently, in an end-of-tour first, I will be PCSing to exactly nowhere in the coming days. Since my orders are from a domestic assignment to an overseas assignment via long-term training, we’ll spend the next year living in our same house. I’ll just pivot from working in DC to working in Arlington. I won’t be entitled to PCS Lodging or per diem as I train up for my one-year assignment to Burma.
I’m telling myself it’s just a bonus that we won’t have to move three times in three years.
An End of Tour First…
…At least, for me. I am about three weeks away from finishing my fourth tour in the Office of Children’s Issues in Washington. I’m in a busy period of time at work. But it hasn’t escaped me that at this point during every prior tour, I was working and buried in preparations for Permanent Change of Station (PCS) moves.
By comparison, my to-do list now – while never finished – seems manageable. I do have some trepidation about going into 13 months of full-time training, particularly 10 months of Burmese language class. Going from 60% remote to 100% in-person will pose challenges too – logistical, mental, and personal. But for the time being, I’m grateful to wrap up a tour for the first time without the stress of an overseas PCS move looming days away.
PN250: Core Skills for Mid-Level Officers
Two weeks ago I went “back to school,” attending a weeklong mid-level training focused on strategic decision-making at the Foreign Service Institute (FSI). I hadn’t been on campus since March 2020, four months before we ultimately left for my third tour in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. An FSI leadership training had been the last scheduled course I’d managed to attend before Foreign Affairs Counterthreat Training (FACT) was cancelled due to COVID and we went into lockdown in our PCS Lodging apartment.
Four years later, in spring 2024, FSI looks both the same and somehow changed to me. Since I’ve been gone, construction has started – and finished – on the new B Building. The resultant space is modern and light-filled. Flowering trees and daffodils dot the landscape in pinks and yellows. Green grass lawns stretch like taut carpets, connecting the cafeteria to its adjacent counterpart structures and hosting the perfect place for jeans-clad students to read, eat, or throw a frisbee around.
But as I came back to FSI, I couldn’t help but think the bucolic scenery seemingly belied the terrible reality the world – and our workplace – have seen since 2020. However much things have changed and are now attempting to boomerang back, they can’t truly return to what they once were. Not for me. And yet here we are. Like all successful creatures, we adapt and keep going. This trial run going to FSI for a week was as much a test for me of my current logistical and life skills (and how ready I am for a year of a slow roller coaster that builds and builds) as it was the core skills the Department sought to impart through PN250.
Collecting Postcards 