How I Took My Arabic from 2 to 3

One of the requirements of our diplomatic work is being able to communicate in foreign languages. I personally see the opportunity to learn and practice new languages as one of the biggest perks of a Foreign Service job. To determine our language abilities, we're tested by examiners at the Foreign Service Institute (FSI) using the Inter-Agency Language Roundtable (ILR) scoring system. The scale goes from 0 (no proficiency) to 5 (native or bilingual fluency), but the Department of State recently stopped scoring people that high and just said everyone who scores at least a 4 (full professional proficiency) will be given a special designation of Advanced Proficiency, or AP.

Most Foreign Service jobs that require a language require a 3 (professional working proficiency), though some (like the Consular job I did in Seoul) only require a 2 (limited working proficiency). Most language scores expire every five years, so we often retest even in languages where we previously achieved proficiency. Passing the language test can really help when it comes to bidding (i.e., applying for the next assignment) or help you get a pay bonus if you're serving at a post where that language is used (depending on the language - usually this is just for "critical languages" that are high priority but difficult for most English speakers to learn).

When I joined the Foreign Service in 2017, I tested in Arabic and received a score of 2/2 - the first part of the score is for speaking and the second is for reading. I remember feeling disappointed given my many years of studying Arabic in my undergraduate and graduate programs as well as countless night classes, online classes, and studying abroad in Oman, but I didn't think too much of it especially after I was assigned to Nairobi and then Seoul for my first few tours. After that, I finally made my way to working on the Middle East, where I knew I wanted to refresh my language score after it expired.

At first, I only wanted to renew my score of 2/2. However, when I tested last year I was surprised to get a 2+/3. (One thing to know about the ILR scale is that a score of "X+" is much closer to the next level than it is to X. The way someone once explained it to me is that the evaluators almost wanted to give you the next level score but you didn't maintain that level consistently enough, so they downgraded you to the level below with a plus instead.) Once I was that close, I decided to retest and recently received my 3! (Unfortunately for people like me who did well in reading, the Department of State recently decided to focus only on speaking for testing purposes so now we just have a single-number score instead of two.)

For those who are preparing for their own FSI language tests, I thought I'd condense some of the best advice and things that helped me in case it's useful for others. Here are my best tips for language test prep on your own (i.e., when you're not in full-time language training) that don't violate any non-disclosure agreements, in no particular order:

• Meticulously review the FSI language testing SharePoint page including all FAQs and sample materials. The test format has changed quite a bit in recent years and the internal SharePoint is your best source for the latest and most accurate information on the format and content.
• Always take advantage of distance language learning (DLL) and the post language program (PLP), even if your post or your job don't require the language. We're very lucky to have access to free foreign language classes all over the world, and I found these essential for maintaining and improving my language skills.
• I included this in a previous post on maintaining language skills generally, but know language-specific filler words (i.e., the other language's equivalent of "um") and essential clarifying vocabulary (like "Could you please repeat that more slowly?" or "What does that mean?") in that language to reduce the amount of time your brain switches to English or your native language while you're trying to speak the target language.
• My advice from a previous FSI test to be bold and to practice your self-introduction still applies, but now they've shifted the test from a personal introduction to a professional one. Be prepared to talk about your current work and past work right off the bat in the test.
• Keep a few proverbs and idiomatic expressions in your back pocket, but make sure you know how to use them correctly. A well-placed proverb can really demonstrate you have a nuanced and advanced command of the language.
• Especially now that the test is focused only on speaking, make sure you get real conversational practice beforehand. It's not enough (in my opinion) to listen to podcasts and read the news, but you need to practice speaking whether that's in a classroom or with a family member or friend. (In my case, I started speaking Arabic with S Monday through Friday to help him keep up with his Arabic, and it's paid huge dividends for improving my comfort with conversation.)
• For Arabic, pick the dialect you're most comfortable with - not the one you think will be the most practical for a specific post. In my case, I picked Modern Standard Arabic because I had always learned Arabic formally in school and that's what I'm most comfortable speaking. With my lack of knowledge now, I definitely wouldn't be able to perform on test day in any dialect!
• Explore the best language learning apps for you. To prepare for my FSI test, I used a combination of Anki (flashcard app), Duolingo (gamified language learning), Drops (vocabulary-focused app with lots of inclusive langauge), and Lingolette (AI short articles with audio, questions, and freeform answers to check comprehension and then a conversation with real-time correction afterward). At other times in my life, I preferred italki (private certified virtual tutors, who really helped with my accent and some advanced grammar questions I had) and Mango Languages (which helped me refresh my language skills after a long period of disuse). On the other hand, I tried Rosetta Stone many years ago and quickly learned it was not my cup of tea. After my test, I discovered that Google's Gemini Voice Assistant speaks Arabic quite well and understands many dialects (though it always answers in Modern Standard Arabic). Knowing that, I think I would try using that tool more for future conversational practice and test prep. Figuring out the right apps (if any) for you will take some trial and error.
• Use every opportunity to practice the language with native speakers, and accept the inevitability of mistakes. It's normal! Most people will be so thrilled you're learning their language, they will forgive any errors you make. Meeting people from around the world, traveling, and volunteering could all be opportunities to practice your language skills.

It's much harder to achieve score improvements without full-time language training, but it's not impossible. I hope my list of tips comes in handy for at least some readers preparing for their next FSI test!

#WhatGovDoes: One Data Point

Image by mar lidia from Pixabay

Someone on social media made the point that amid all the news headlines in the United States about the federal workforce, there's a lot of confusion about what the U.S. government actually does. I think it's even less obvious to most people in the realm of international affairs, because few Americans know what Foreign Service members do or how we advance the interests of the American people. Foreign Service Spouse Crystalline Randazzo started the hashtag #WhatGovDoes to share more about what we do, so I'm adding to the conversation with the list of some of the things I've done, in no particular order:

• When notified of a U.S. citizen's unexpected death in international waters in the middle of the night during the pandemic, I called that citizen's spouse back home and informed them. I helped negotiate the transfer of the deceased person's remains and belongings back to the family, despite concerns from the local government that the remains posed a COVID-19 risk. I ensured that family did not bear the costs of returning the remains and received all the rights due to them under international maritime law.
• I have assisted surviving family members with recording U.S. citizens' deaths abroad and providing the necessary paperwrok for them to transport the remains back to the United States for burial, if needed.
• I have issued many, many passports for U.S. citizens including emergency passports.
• I have issued many, many Consular Reports of Birth Abroad documenting the birth of U.S. citizens overseas.
• I have issued many, many visas for students, businesspeople, investors, tourists, and other non-immigrant visitors who poured millions and millions of dollars into the U.S. economy.
• I have denied many, many visas for travelers who posed a threat to U.S. national security or interests or otherwise did not qualify for a U.S. visa.
• I have comforted U.S. citizen victims of violent crime including sexual assault and helped them navigate the complexities of a foreign justice system with compassion. I ensured that failures to address violent crimes against U.S. citizens factor into the U.S. Department of State's public annual Human Rights Report and enhanced international cooperation between the United States and our partners on transnational sexual cybercrimes like fake pornography.
• I have helped U.S. citizens in critical medical condition return home with a medical evacuation.
• I have helped U.S. citizens without money, living on the streets of a foreign country, get an emergency loan to return safely home.
• I have visited U.S. citizens in prison overseas and ensured they did not face discrimination or mistreatment due to being American.
• I have helped U.S. citizens in prison overseas apply for the international prisoner transfer program, which allows U.S. prisoners to transfer to a prison back home and serve their sentence closer to their loved ones.
• I have taken custody of a wealthy American's belongings when he died alone overseas with no next of kin on record including no parents, no children, no spouse, and no siblings. With my colleagues, we found nine cousins in the United States and ensured they received their rightful inheritance instead of it being lost in a foreign country.
• I assisted American parents whose children were abducted and taken to another country by the other parent with the legal and law enforcement processes necessary to return their children home under international law.
• I helped negotiate a change to the implementation of a local law that drastically reduced barriers to American business.
• I supported official visits culminating in a joint financing deal unlocking hundreds of millions of dollars in co-investment for U.S. businesses overseas.
• I have promoted U.S. leadership and influence in critical sectors including AI and other emerging technology, including warning our partners about the national security consequences of using untrusted technology from our adversaries.
• I have informed Americans overseas how to vote from abroad and helped get their ballots back in time for the vote to count.
• I have served as a spokesperson explaining the United States and what we stand for to everyone from school groups to journalists to the general public to other countries' diplomats.
• I have served as a duty officer, who takes U.S. citizen emergency calls at any time after hours on nights or weekends. (I'm even the duty officer as I write this blog post, and in one day this week I helped a U.S. citizen couple who lost their passports in transit, a U.S. citizen who was arrested, and a U.S. citizen who was scared for their family member trapped in Syria and at risk of violence.)
• I helped a 3-year-old child and his parents secure emergency travel documents to fly to the United States for an approved heart transplant, without which his doctors confirmed he would have died within 48 hours.
• I have helped people understand Americans better and helped Americans understand others better through exchange programs and cultural diplomacy. This brings more people to the United States and supports our economy, debunks negative stereotypes holding us back from our full potential cooperation in shared interests with our partners, and helps Americans receive a warmer welcome when they travel abroad.

My experience is just one data point, but I hope it helps illuminate the work we do a bit better. If you're a federal government employee or have benefitted from the work of a federal government employee, please feel free to share #WhatGovDoes in the comments below!

My Biggest Early-Career Mistake

Today I wanted to share my biggest early-career mistake, one that I think a lot of early-career people make not just in diplomacy but in many fields. I hope that there are readers who benefit from this and can avoid some of the pitfalls I couldn't, since those lessons can be very painful to learn. Without further ado, my biggest early-career mistake was not knowing how to manage workplace conflict.

People would say and do things that offended me, bothered me, and even undermined me professionally and it wasn't obvious to me how I was supposed to resolve it. I consulted my mentors and most of them said they were conflict avoidant themselves and would choose to ignore almost everything if they were me. They were well meaning, but I don't think this advice was the most helpful. In professional settings (and life) there are a lot of people who bottle up resentments and talk badly about people behind their backs, but far fewer people who are willing to address difficult conflict in an open-minded and productive way directly with the person they have conflict with. I, too, kept many of my grievances to myself and bought into negative narratives about people (which in our line of work we call bad corridor reputation) without giving people a chance to address the issues. I'd like to think this is something I've improved at over time.

Here's a real, anonymized example from my life. I once took notes at a meeting, and one of my coworkers didn't like my summary of the conversation. He said, "You shouldn't have included that quote from that person!" I stood my ground and said, "That's what she said, though." He replied, "She was misinformed and now you've spread incorrect information with these notes!" Clearly, my notes bothered him, but it was too late for me to go back and change them since I'd already circulated them with our internal offices. Moreover, I wasn't convinced that I needed to change them. He lost his temper and began sending emails to my colleagues saying I didn't know what I was doing and that I was unqualified. He would raise his voice to me on the phone and send all-caps emails. Finally, the straw that broke the camel's back: when I had a meeting with contacts at another organization, he told these people, whom I was meeting for the first time, that I was ignorant and didn't know what I was talking about.

The entry-level me would have simmered until I boiled over, railing about this guy to anybody and everybody except him. I might even have taken steps to switch portfolios and projects to avoid working with him again, writing off our professional relationship as irreparably doomed. This time, I took my concerns up the chain of command and began documenting everything in case it got worse and I needed to escalate. (I had learned the hard way earlier in my career that sometimes documentation and witnesses were necessary.) To my shock, multiple people I raised my concerns with made comments like, "Oh, yeah. Everyone knows he can't work well with women" or "He's just sexist; don't take it personally" or "There have been so many women like you who have complained about this before." I guess these responses were supposed to make me feel better, but instead they made me extremely frustrated. If this was a known issue, why didn't anybody address it? And had we all really just decided to tolerate someone who couldn't work with half of the population? Was that even really the problem?

I told leadership that I was going to try to resolve this directly with the colleague, but if that failed I had no choice but to escalate. I knew I couldn't do my job effectively with a coworker harassing me in the office and deriding me in front of others. When I first asked him to sit down and talk one-on-one, he avoided me, ignoring my calls and emails. (Note: I find these conversations are always best one-on-one if you have a choice.) Finally, I asked him to hang behind and talk one-on-one after a group meeting we both attended. In that room, I told him that I didn't know he felt that strongly about the initial meeting notes I had written. I told him how his actions since made me feel like he didn't respect me as a colleague and undermined me and my work, making it difficult to do my job. To his credit, he admitted he lost his temper. He apologized to me and said he wouldn't do that again. We discussed together a solution for the next time we faced a disagreement. And you know what? Despite all the horrible things everyone had said about this guy, he never did do those things again. He did work with me constructively when we disagreed. He helped find compromises. I was not only able to tolerate working with him again, but we both enjoyed working together again.

This experience made me realize people were perfectly happy to make assumptions about his character or the reasons why he behaved the way he did, but those same people hadn't been willing to have the tough conversations necessary to find out if their assumptions were correct or to move forward. People tried to marginalize him and his work when they reached a point of friction instead of addressing the friction itself. I thought about all the misunderstandings and conflicts that arise in typical working life and accrue over time and wondered how many of them could be completely transformed by a simple, honest conversation.

I'll be the first to admit I didn't have the skills to do this when I first started my career, and it's still not easy. It's not fun to have difficult conversations about how someone has hurt or impeded you or to hear about how you might have hurt or impeded them. But those conversations are essential to people and teams achieving their full potential. It's easier in the short-term to avoid conflict, bottle things up, and then message your group chat what a jerk your work rival is. In the long-term, though, everyone is better served by healthier conflict resolution.

When I tell that true story, the response I most often get is, "But what if he'd doubled down instead?" In that scenario, I still see the difficult conversation as necessary. It shows that you tried to resolve things at the lowest possible level and it gives you the information you need to know whether you need to escalate: whether that's bringing in your supervisors or requesting a mediator or in some cases even filing a formal grievance or complaint with that documentation you prepared in advance.

It may be my inherent optimism, but deep down I truly believe that if more conflicts were addressed sooner in healthier ways, they would never get to that point. I can definitely think of conflicts earlier in my career that I might be mature enough and savvy enough and skilled enough to defuse better now. And there are probably others I will experience in the future that could be de-escalated, but that I may lack the ability to defuse now. It's reassuring to me to think of this as a skill you can never "complete" or "master" but one that grows in strength with repeated use over time, like a muscle of emotional intelligence. It reminds me that nobody is perfect and we all make mistakes, so hopefully when others make mistakes the least we can do is give a fair shot of repairing the relationship - just as we would hope people can do for us when we mess up.

Of course, I don't want to take this idea to the extreme. I don't think people need to tolerate abusive or toxic environments, and some working relationships are not possible or worthwhile to save because the (emotional, mental, physical, and - in the case of some formal grievances requiring legal representation - financial) cost is simply too great. However, I'd like to think those cases are a small minority. I fundamentally believe that most people are good people trying their best and falling short from time to time. The more positive experiences people have of resolving conflict and repairing relationships, the more I find they too begin to believe it's possible and approach conflict with a healthier mindset. This is a small impact each of us can make in our circles every single day, and it can ripple outward and lead others to start doing the same.

Would you agree that this is a common mistake people make early in their careers? Do you have any tips for resolving conflict in a healthier way? If so, I hope you'll consider sharing in the comments. Thanks for reading!