Taking the Korean DLPT

After three years of living in Korea (before joining the Army), a year of self-study, and months of procrastination, I finally broke down and took the Defense Language Proficiency Test for Korean. That was a pretty big deal for me because it's not often you get quantitative results on something you spend four years trying to learn.

To build on the Defense Language Institute's frequently asked questions, the two parts to the test are three hours for part, each comprised of 65 questions. You can take a 15 minute break halfway through each part if you want.

The reading section is easier in my opinion because you can spend as much time as you want looking over each of the 65 reading passages before you answer each the question. In the listening, you can only listen to the passage once before answering. At the end of each section, you can go back and correct any answers you want before submitting; in the listening you can go back and change your answers, but it doesn't make much sense without being able to listen again.

Unlike the GLOSS materials, the speakers in the listening section always speak very clearly and with a standard accent, which I thought was good. Although I spent just about the full three hours on the reading section, the listening section goes much quicker, and there's only so much time you can ponder an answer before you forget what you just heard.

I'm both happy and unhappy about the results -- I scored a 1+ in the Reading section and 1+ on Listening.

I'm happy because it's not bad for someone who never had a formal class, and because it further opens the door to what I want to do in the future. However, I'm still unsatisfied because I was probably only a few questions away from finally getting paid for all that time I've invested.

To put that "1+" in perspective, I explain the DLPT scale like this:

• Level 5 is a perfectly fluent, college-educated, native-level speaker who reads the newspaper a lot. They can distinguish regional accents, understand humor, comprehend idioms and slang, and talk about stuff from politics to military affairs to socio-cultural matters.
  
  I will never be one of these in any language except English, and even then I'm not sure.
  
  
• Level 4 is a college-educated person who's good enough at that language to go on TV and speak. Maybe they have a little bit of an accent, but it doesn't distract. I'd put most of those foreign diplomats you see speaking on TV a "4" in English.
  
  
• Level 3 is a good working level command of the language. They can read or listen and comprehend a wide variety of topics, such as nuclear weapons development and their effect on regional security, ecological repercussions of industrial pollution, and the social impact of economic recessions. This is the level that foreign area officers aspire to, and yeah it's hefty stuff, but that's why they get the maximum benefit for their language -- for East Asian languages, $400 per month.
  
  
• Level 2 is considered "limited working proficiency." If you can understand a news story either on TV or in a newspaper, you're about there. There's a "plus" level between two and three that's worth $300 a month; regular 2 in both reading and listening is worth $200.

In case you're curious, doing 90 hours of Rosetta Stone is nice, but at best that gets you from Level 0 (no skill at all) to level 0+. You're basically limited to simple sentences, uttering some niceties in a group setting, and asking for food. That's about it.

With that in mind, I'm pretty happy with my 1 plusses. While still not "fluent," I've made significant progress and I can see my goal is within reach.

Though I have to wait at least six months to take the Korean test again, I'm thinking about trying something different. Should I learn a Middle Eastern language to prepare for a deployment? Alternatively, brushing up on my Chinese or Japanese might make my ORB look a bit more impressive. ("Wow lieutenant, you know both Korean and Chinese?") Or I could continue with Korean in the hopes of better luck six months from now.

Decisions, decisions....