One of the first steps of most TIME foreign correspondents on a new assignment is to hire a tutor for language lessons. Even the most fluent linguists usually need a refresher course in such staples as French, German, Spanish, Portuguese or Italian. Some other languages with which TIME correspondents have grappled: Dutch, Arabic, Russian, Hindi, Tamil, Urdu, Korean, Afrikaans, Greek, Japanese and Chinese. There was, for example, the lady visitor who recently walked into TIME'S Rome office and heard two staff members chatting heatedly in Japanese. Said she: "This organization should be located somewhere east of Suez."

Senior Orientalist on the Rome staff is Bob Christopher, who learned Japanese as a World War II intelligence officer. On previous assignments, Bureau Chief Bob Neville picked up some Hindustani and Chinese (to top off his childhood Oklahoma Cherokee vocabulary), learned Italian when he was World War II boss of Stars & Stripes's Mediterranean edition. Dean Brelis came to Rome equipped with Greek and fluent Kachin, a language which he learned in two years with Kachin tribesmen while operating behind the Japanese lines with an OSS detachment in Burma.

The Rome bureau's tutor is Giorgio Vanucci, who learned his English in Allied prison camps during the war. He speaks pure Tuscan, has little tolerance for Anglicized Italian or the intrusion of Roman dialect. Occasionally his uncompromising stand on pronunciation produces mutinous rumblings among his TIME students.

Middle East Correspondent Keith Wheeler has had language tutors in Greece, Germany and Italy, but, he adds: "I have always, unfortunately, been forced to move on about the time we were to tackle irregular verbs. I am looking forward to having time for a real cram course." One of his favorite words in his new Arabic vocabulary is magnoon, which means "insane" and, he says, is the epithet usually applied to native automobilists.

The Paris bureau's George Abell got an early start in French"from my Breton nurse, who was later murdered by our German coachman two years after he married her." Frank White arrived in the Paris office in 1948 equipped with a combination of college French, Foreign Legion French, and colonial French picked up in Indo-China after the war. "To Parisians," he says, "I sounded like a Saigonese houseboy." M. Dennis, his tutor, cured that. Two years later White was in Rio de Janeiro meeting another tutor at 9 o'clock every morning to master Portuguese, and in another two years he was in Bonn, where Frau Anne Marie von Dobschiitz began explaining the intricacies of German syntax.

Cranston Jones, who inherited White's 9 o'clock tutoring appointment in Rio, had been in Brazil only two weeks when he had to go to Belem, near the mouth of the Amazon, to cover a plane-crash story. Late one evening, he found himself lost in the town, and worse, he could not remember the name of his hotel. The people on the sidewalk spoke no French or English; he had not yet learned Portuguese. "Finally," says Jones, "a padre shouldered his way through the crowd and asked me if I spoke Latin. I went into an effort of total recall, back to Caesar studied in 1933, finally came stumbling out with 'Quid est via ad domum publicum panamericanae?' In all honesty, I must admit his reply in Latin meant nothing to me, but he had me at the hotel in ten minutes."

Another time, Jones had touse American slang to get out of a tough spot. He and two staffers were covering an Arab nationalist uprising in Tunisia in 1952, when his car was stopped by a large band of Arabs. "After many minutes of trying to convince them that we were les Americains and not Frenchmen, who were being shot at the time, the sheik called for silence, indicated he would give me the test. In complete silence he stuck his wrinkled face up to mine and said, with a look of infinite cunning, the only American word he knew: 'Okay.' I replied emphatically, 'Okay.' The sheik shouted his approval, the tribesmen clapped their hands, and the Berber women set up their welcoming cry of 'yo-yo-yo-yo-yo-yo.' "

By luck, Jones and party had been stopped in the same area where American troops had passed in the war.

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