Foreign language training for Medusas

Now that we know it's possible for real women to become real Medusas, it occurs to me that I've gathered a lot of information over the course of writing my Medusa series of books that might be of interest to a woman who'd like to pursue becoming a female Special Forces operative.

If you're one of those courageous ladies, from time to time, I'll share links and sources with you that might be helpful in your preparation to enter this incredibly demanding and rewarding world.

The first thing I'm going to suggest is the Rosetta foreign language programs. They are, bar none, the best software I've ever found for learning a language fast and well. They have software for dozens of languages, too. But what language to choose?

You need to pick a language that's used in a part of the world you're interested in working in and which is of high strategic or political interest to the United States. Some of those are pretty obvious...the Middle East, Pakistan, Afghanistan.

But there a few other countries of emerging significance to consider: Brazil and Turkey come to mind immediately. If you can physically pass for Chinese, it's a no-brainer to learn Chinese.

Two other considerations: What languages are spoken widely throughout the world, and where are places women are completely marginalized and ignored and where they can be developed as valuable intelligence assets.

Using these criteria, French and Spanish leap onto the list a widely used and potentially valuable languages, and perhaps Hindi (India) or Farsi (Iran).

Personally, I wouldn't recommend Russian. Remind me to blog sometime about how the Russian population is gradually collapsing and the impact it's likely to have on them as a world power. I also don't think it's a country we need to use female operators in specifically in order to gain access to intelligence information.

Rosetta works best if you use it daily. If there's an advanced level Rosetta program in your language of choice, by all menas get it and master it, too. Then, do whatever you can to practice and use that language with native speakers of the tongue. Watch it on television, read the language on the Internet, whatever you can to increase your proficiency. It takes about a year of hard work, but you can master another language if you want it bad enough!

(And it'll take a year to get into good enough shape to pass the physical portion of your training anyway. You may as well use the time to put another language on your resume, too.)

Good luck!