learning

I’m walking beside the River Seine in the French city of Rouen when I realise that I’ve been speaking French – without pausing to find a word or struggle with grammar – for five whole minutes. Anna, my French “prof” for the week, nods encouragingly and so I continue. It’s a breakthrough moment, if only for my confidence.

This is the last day of a DIY language course that I devised when Rouen’s language schools told me they were full for the only week I could get away. When I then enquired about their private tutors, I was told no one was available. This turned out to save me a pretty penny: language school tutors cost €60 an hour while Anna – who I discovered on the website Apprentus – is a cost-effective €19 an hour.

For the last couple of winters I’ve tried to spend a week or so brushing up my “intermediate” French language skills, in situ. A spate of new research on the remarkable cognitive benefits of learning a second language have made me a keen user of apps and podcasts – and yet no amount of AI-generated tutoring can compete with talking to (and being corrected and helped by) a real person.

Learning in situ also comes with a chance to travel, to communicate with dozens of people, to experience the culture that accompanies the language one is trying so hard to learn. Last winter, I went to a language school in Montpellier. Three hours a day didn’t come cheap. The class was large: 12 pupils from across the world. I spent my mornings pinned to a plastic chair in a cramped, tatty classroom, listening to my peers struggle through various exercises.

This isn’t the best way to learn. A recent study published in Nature suggests that moving helps us concentrate, remember and generally learn more effectively. Little wonder that I left Montpellier feeling I hadn’t learned much.

So I was delighted when Anna suggested that we do our two-hour classes on foot round Rouen. “If it rains,” she said, “we can talk over goûter.” Le Goûter is the French tradition of taking a small snack between lunch and dinner – a bit like English teatime.

Having booked Anna (a political sciences student at the University of Rouen Normandy) for 10 hours of French conversation over five days, I reserved a studio apartment (bang in the historic heart of Rouen for less than £60 a night) and bought a ferry ticket from Newhaven to Dieppe. Rouen is a one-hour train journey from the port, and the combined ferry-train ticket (return) cost a thrifty £65.

Anna and I met outside the ornate Saint-Maclou church, clearly both a little nervous. After all, we were about to spend 10 hours alone together, with no prior knowledge of each other. It also turned out that I was Anna’s first pupil since she’d registered on Apprentus. Moreover, she had signed up expecting to help kids with their homework. Instead she got me – a woman old enough to be her mother.

We needn’t have worried. Anna had come straight from a (peaceful) protest march, and within minutes we were chatting away about the concerns of French students, as we strolled. Anna doubled as a tour guide, showing me all her favourite corners of Rouen – while simultaneously correcting my French. When it rained, she introduced me to Rouen’s best tea houses (the Dame Cakes salon de thé was a particular favourite), in effect doubling as my dining companion.

While Anna’s first language is French, she also speaks excellent English, meaning she could explain complex grammar to me. Her Senegal heritage meant that I also learned about the turbulent history of west Africa, as well as being brought up to speed on the ongoing student protests. We spent one fascinating lesson – which also involved riding Rouen’s buses – discussing Senegal’s matrilineal history of priestesses and queens, in French. Who knew? Not me!

Anna’s suggestions for lessons included an outing to Rouen’s Musée des Beaux-Arts (free, as are most of Rouen’s museums) which bills itself as France’s biggest impressionist collection outside Paris. We walked Rouen’s riverside pathways, which run for miles up and down the Seine, and ambled through the city’s beautiful, medieval quarters, stopping to explore areas such as the Place de Vieux-Marché, where Joan of Arc was burned alive. As these areas are largely car-free, we didn’t have to worry about dodging mopeds or shouting over the roar of traffic.

I could have hired Anna for longer, but two hours of one-to-one tuition each day felt optimal for my brain as it struggled to recall a very distant French A-level. I used the rest of my time to read a French novel, listen to French radio and TV, and wander Rouen with the self-challenge of talking to as many people as I could. Imagine my delight when, on my last day, a shop assistant asked me if I was local!

Anna and I finished our week with hugs and promises to keep in touch. My “prof” (the French abbreviation of professeur/e, commonly used to mean teacher) had proved to be informative, knowledgable, cost effective and great fun. And my six days, including food, transport, tutor and accommodation, had cost little more than £600.

On the ferry home, I couldn’t help wondering if human connections like this – an on-foot tutor, guide and new best friend rolled into one – might be the (fun) future of language learning.

Annabel Abbs (writing as Annabel Streets) is the author of The Walking Cure, published by Bloomsbury (£10.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply

Army leaders preparing for a potential fight in the Pacific told us that some of the biggest lessons they’ve learned from the war in Ukraine and America’s now-paused fight against Iran are to move around assets that you can and find a better way to camouflage those that you can’t. While seemingly common sense, these lessons come from watching how war is now waged. The ubiquity of drones in Ukraine providing constant overwatch and strike capabilities, and U.S. troops killed and equipment destroyed or damaged by massive Iranian barrages on static installations are informing changes to how the Army trains, equips and operates.

These conversations took place during the recently wrapped Association of the U.S. Army (AUSA) annual convention in Washington, D.C., which TWZ attended.

“A lot of the things that are happening right now in terms of long-range fires, integrated air and missile defense, and the lessons that we’re learning from them, we’re able to bring a lot of that to our potential challenges in the Pacific,” Gen. Ron Clark, commander of U.S. Army Pacific (USARPAC), told us at a media roundtable. “Specifically, I am thinking through mobility and camouflage. So it’s one of those age-old Army forgotten sciences of how to hide in plain sight and how to camouflage ourselves from observation, because the ability to be able to see surface entities is almost ubiquitous.”

“Our ability to be able to use electronic warfare, to be able to use just good old-fashioned camouflage, and the ability to deceive our adversary is a must,” Clark added. You can read more about the U.S. military’s camouflage and deception efforts in our story here.

As we have frequently reported about the Ukraine war, both sides have been using a variety of “old-fashioned” tactics to duck, dodge and hide. They range from practices like smokescreens to hide from drones to updates on measures from the past like paint schemes designed to obfuscate vehicles and other equipment from AI-enabled targeting systems.

 As tough as things have been for Ukraine and for U.S. forces in the Middle East, the challenges will be even greater in the Pacific, Clark warned.

In Europe and the Middle East, “it’s not a near-peer adversary that we will be working against,” said Clark, referring respectively to Russia and Iran.

“Whereas in our theater, it absolutely is,” the USARPAC commander noted in a reference to China without naming the country. “So our ability to scale that and to think through the problem sets of how do we fight Type One, Type Two UAS? How do we think through ballistic missile defense holistically in the region? We spend a lot of time working with the joint force for solutions associated with that. How do we maneuver inside an archipelagic environment?”

For the Army, any fight in the Pacific will require soldiers to be able to hop islands and move through vast swaths of ocean, constantly hunted and frequently inside the Chinese weapons engagement zone. Clark said that the Army’s organic fleet of ships like landing craft, small tugs, and modular causeway systems operated by the service’s 8th Theater Sustainment Command will be vital for maneuver.

The Army, however, is struggling to keep its aging fleet of 70 of these vessels in the water and it got rid of a number of others over the years. Concerns about this underappreciated force have been something TWZ has raised for years.

“But we also have to be able to conduct tactical maneuver with forces on the ground that can provide long-range precision fires, as an example, and then move so that fires, radars, sensors are not easily targeted,” Clark added. “Because if they can see you, they can hit you. And if you know they have an opportunity to return fire, they will. So our lessons that we’re learning are, in some cases, are very, very relevant. In some cases, we can learn from some of the changing characteristics of war.”

Still, the wide-open plains and dense cities of Ukraine are quite different from the beaches and jungles of the Pacific, Clark reminded us.

“The way we generally fight does not equate specifically in the Ukraine piece to the maneuver that you would see out of U.S. forces if deployed in a conflict like that,” the USARPAC commander explained. “To be able to use operational maneuver and tactical maneuver in a way that it’s not just simply drone on drone or firing long range fires at one another at scale for an extended period of time. We find our way to work through that problem set and maneuver to positions of advantage and to prevail.”

Regardless of the terrain, the ubiquity of drones in the Ukraine war has made maneuver and resupply deadly endeavors, with much of the front lines bogged down with limited territorial advances by either combatant.

When we pushed further on that point, Gen. Xavier T. Brunson, commander of United Nations Command, Combined Forces Command and United States Forces Korea, weighed in.

“To be able to move with sensors everywhere at all times causes us to achieve positions of advantage from distributed locations,” Brunson pointed out. “So the fight is: you look at maneuver. You might maneuver to a position of advantage, knowing that you’re going to change that again. The ability to utilize not only joint sensors but joint effectors, if you will, joint fires, to be able to use those things from different positions changes the shape of the operating environment.”

The bottom line, he added, is that “maneuver is always going to be maneuver. You’re going from A to B, but you might go from A to A1 to A2 to A3 to get to B, and that’s what I think we realize in this distributed fight that’s going on in Ukraine, and so we continue to watch to see what lessons might be coming back into” effect.

In part reacting to lessons learned from Ukraine and the Middle East, the Army is also changing how it trains, Clark stated. In South Korea, he said the service has to get out of the habit of concentrating so heavily on just two annual major training exercises.

“We recognize… that largely the two big exercises every year in Korea focus on large command posts,” Clark proffered. “We’ve got to move away from that. So what we intend to do is take advantage of the knowledge that we have of the threats that exist or that prevail in the Ukraine fight.”

Clark said these discussions are underway with his deputy commander, Republic of Korea Army Gen. Sungmin Kim.

“We talk about how we would operate in a distributed fashion. You know as well as I do, there’s a location that we go to to train every year in Korea, and we stay in that place,” Clark said in response to a question from another reporter. “What would it look like if we train from Jeju all the way up to Gyeonggi Province in the north? What would that look like, just with our headquarters alone?”

“So just imagine,” Clark postulated, “if we train across the entirety of the peninsula, and got ourselves in the shape where we would say [to North Korea], ‘You can’t utilize the things that you’ve learned in the fight and the battlefield in Ukraine on us, because we learned the same lessons and we’ve distributed ourselves in such a way that we don’t make ourselves the target. We won’t be moored in place,’ and that’s what I’m talking about when I talk about positional advantage. It might not be the same place to the continuum. It might not be the same place when you’re in crisis or conflict or competition. We might have to change that, and that’s what we’re learning.”

Another lesson from Ukraine that Army leaders should be paying attention to, said another panelist, is how both sides are using aerial and ground drones to supply frontline forces and evacuate the wounded because human efforts have now become too deadly, thanks to drones.

“I think you also can’t talk about Ukraine without talking about autonomy,” said Tara Murphy Dougherty, CEO of a company called Air, which provides AI-based sustainment solutions to the Army.

“One of the advantages that you get from using simulation and automation, and really using models and compute in order to create convoy plans, as opposed to humans with Excel spreadsheets, is you are able to do many fewer actual convoys because you’re using all of your capabilities so much more effectively and efficiently,” Dougherty posited. “And while it’s an indirect example, I think it does tie to soldier protection because you’re putting fewer soldiers out there in vulnerable settings. I see that not as an end-goal outcome; we need convoys.”

Ultimately, however, the Army will have to advance what Ukraine and Russia are doing with the deployment of aerial drones and uncrewed ground vehicles for logistics by creating “convoys” of autonomous vehicles.

“I see the end goal outcome as having as many autonomous convoys as possible, and we’ve heard today already at this event some of those ideas,” the CEO added. “In the interim, until we get to more autonomy in medevac and more autonomy in convoys when it’s non-soldier material that’s going out to the battlefield, let’s try and put fewer out there while actually getting more material and capability into the force where it needs to be.”

The Iranian missile and drone barrages on fixed U.S. bases across the Middle East have created some very costly lessons for American forces. As we noted earlier in this story, several troops were killed and critical air defense radars, aircraft and other important equipment were destroyed or damaged. U.S. installations across the region have also suffered damage.

In another media session, we pressed Army officials operating in South Korea about what they learned from watching the destruction caused by Iran and what they are doing to address it.

You can see a satellite image of damage to a U.S. radar site in Jordan below:

“We certainly are watching what’s happening, and we are learning from what is happening in Operation Epic Fury,” Lt. Gen. Joseph “Joe” Hilbert, commanding general of Eighth Army, stationed in South Korea, told us. “We’re learning what’s happening in Ukraine, and we are working through changes in our own tactics and techniques and procedures to be able to react to those threats and to be able to defend against them.”

For more details, he turned the microphone over to Col. Rosanna “Ro” M. Clemente, commander of the 35th Air Defense Artillery Brigade in South Korea.

“Drawing from those lessons learned, a lot of it is trying to understand how our systems are being hunted by the adversary,” she told us. “So, strictly into all of our training plans, and as we conduct our own internal exercises, all of our air defenders are practicing something as simple as mobility and survivability jumps, which is being able to reposition and displace your systems to different alternative locations based on any type of threat warnings that we receive. They’re very, very well trained. I think all of our soldiers know how to move their systems extremely, extremely well. They move them quickly, and they are able to move them and reposition them into different locations across the peninsula that still maintains that ballistic missile defense coverage.”

In addition, “we also have to rely on the other pillars of integrated air and missile defense, most specifically the passive defensive measures that we also have in place,” she added.

Those measures involve “a little bit more than just hardening – but a couple of other techniques that we’ve learned from the Russia-Ukraine war in terms of deception, how to move things around, create distractions, and make sure that we create different types of dilemmas for the adversary in terms of where our capabilities are and where are they positioned to protect its defended assets.”

Contact the author: howard@twz.com