I’ve decided to take the military DLAB, though I haven’t scheduled it yet. For those who are familar with it, how does one study/prepare for it?
You don’t. It’s a test of one’s ability to learn a foreign language, not a test of one’s knowledge. Just go into the test as relaxed and attentive as you can be. Pay close attention to the instructions and mark the answer you feel is the most correct for each question.
I took the DLAB in 1987, and while I don’t remember it in any great detail, as I recall it was largely a test where you wore headphones, and you had to listen to nonsense words and phrases, (i.e., na GOO me neh), one object, as I recall, being able to tell how many syllables, which syllable had the primary accent or stress, and sometimes which syllable had a secondary accent.
I concur with Monty; I don’t think it’s something you can study for - I believe the test is designed to weed out people who just don’t have an “ear” for phrase structures unlike English.
Like a test to see if you’re tone deaf before admitting you to choir practice.
Might as well chime in. As others have said it is an attempt to test your ability to learn languages rather then your knowledge of language.
With that said, while there’s not much you can do to “cram” for it, having a solid logic background certainly helps with the non-audio portions in which you’re given a number of nonsense words and phrases along with a partial definition or two[either an outright definition, a picture, or something you can pick up from context].
Sadly, the DLAB does nothing to let you know that you’re very bad at remembering non-native vocabularly and/or have a good ear but horrible pronounciation.
Perhaps that’s why the military also uses the DFLPT (Defense Foreign Language Proficiency Test)?
I took the DLAB in '88 or so (aced it), and then a similar exam as I was considering joining the border patrol as I left the military. I assume I aced it, too, since they invited me back for a followup interview I never bothered showing up for…
There are a few things that you can study for: the basic mechanics of grammar. Know what the different parts of a sentence do. Understand that in other languages words are inflected based on the part of their function. You’ll get a lot of this on those exams. So recognize parts of words and how they differ in a regular fashion from other words that may or may not be similar. Note how different words have the same endings or prefixes. And more than anything else, understand that an artificial language isn’t a one-for-one word substitution with English.
This is true of any language: no language is a one-to-one substitution with another.
It’s a kick in the pants. You can’t study for it. And don’t go into it with the mindset of “I gotta ace this thing” because that’s just unnecessarily stressful. It’s not a test so much as a guage. Like how tall you are, or how much you weigh. It measures your ability to identify and utilize different kinds of linguistic patterns. You can know beef-all about grammer and all that high-fallutin’ cunning linguist stuff and still have a rockin’ good score in the many language patterns it looks for. All you need is a natural ability. If you have it, great. Welcome to the MI community and The Presidio of Monterey. If you don’t have the natural ability, you simply do not want the job any more than you would want to be a chemical munitions test guinnea pig.