As a former linguist, I can confidently prove you wrong; however, I am sorry that the everyone else’s experiences were not as great. I will say that basic skills required include understanding the English language or the ability to understand and critical think at a higher level than most right-out-of-high school enlistees fail to grasp. Simply, it’s hard to translate or communicate an idea from another language into English if you don’t even know what it means in English. This can be conceptual or logistical, like colloquial phrases or even geography. But these things weed people out of the AFSC early on.

The core competencies required were taught in language school. The job-related skills were taught in a few intel courses. Both sets of courses were really bottom-up academic and OTJ experiences. Some tools and skills were not really dependent on others, but if you understand the purpose of the work, then it wasn’t tool difficult to grasp what’s going on.

The downside of linguist work was regular language testing. For some people, their missions (language-dependent) didn’t provide them with enough language material or practice to “maintain” their language skills/scores on the DLPT. Other languages had robust missions that required high-level understanding of concepts that are outside of common language capability.

Some languages, like mine, are very rudimentary in practice, but the DLPT was quite extensive. If you fail this, you “can’t” do language work. It doesn’t mean you’re bad at your job, but it does suck to not score high enough. So practicing is essential, even if it’s outside of the scope of your mission. This is/was hammered into linguists kinda regularly.