← Back to all reasons
Mission Service

The Pentagon's Language School Takes 64 Weeks. The LDS Church Does It in 9.

MTC trains 36,000 students/year in 50+ languages. 9 weeks to conversational for difficult languages like Mandarin — the same language takes 64 weeks at the Defense Language Institute.
Source: NPR, 'Lessons From The Language Boot Camp For Mormon Missionaries,' 2014

The LDS Missionary Training Center (MTC) in Provo trains approximately 36,000 students annually in more than 50 languages. Foreign-language missionaries achieve conversational proficiency in 9 weeks.

For comparison, the Defense Language Institute (DLI) — the U.S. military's language school — takes 64 weeks to train Mandarin speakers. The MTC achieves conversational Mandarin proficiency in 9 weeks. The comparison is for the same language — one of the most difficult for English speakers. NPR covered the MTC's program in 2014, noting its intensity and immersion approach. By volume, the MTC is one of the largest language training operations in the country.

Discussion

← See all reasons