Oswald’s Proficiency in the Russian Language

[Glenn Nall]

38 minutes ago, Paul Trejo said:

James,

I feel sorry for anybody who thinks that Marilyn Murret, school teacher, was a CIA agent.  They probably see CIA agents everywhere, like the JBS saw Communists everywhere.

Regards,
--Paul Trejo

so being a school teacher decreases one's likelihood of being associated with the CIA??? how's that, Paul?

think Harry Hunt Ransom or Walt Rostow might have disagreed with you...?

[James Norwood]

1 hour ago, Paul Trejo said:

James,

I feel sorry for anybody who thinks that Marilyn Murret, school teacher, was a CIA agent.  They probably see CIA agents everywhere, like the JBS saw Communists everywhere.

Regards,
--Paul Trejo

Paul,

I feel sorry for anybody who relies on Priscilla Johnson McMillan in order to formulate opinions about Oswald.  Or, do you think that Priscilla's connections with NANA were innocent?

James

[Paul Trejo]

On 9/19/2017 at 2:30 PM, Mathias Baumann said:

Paul,

I've posted about this before. Oswald's Russian was already quite good BEFORE he went to the USSR.

This link is also very interesting: http://www.dliflc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Generic-Fam-Guide-MC-CBu-updated.pdf

The target level of foreign language tests in the US military is L5/R5. So if Oswald got about 50 percent of the questions right, that means he reached level L2/R2. And without instruction that is EXTREMELY difficult, especially considering the difficulty of Russian. I'm sure he received extensive training.

Mathias,

Do you doubt that a very intelligent young person, motivated, and spending virtually all of his or her free time for nine months studying Russian alphabet and Russian grammar, and struggling to read PRAVDA for all that time, could get a 50 percent score on a written Russian exam?

I don't doubt this.  Lee Harvey Oswald was a lonely guy with a lot of time on his hands at El Toro.

Kerry Thornley may have been his only intellectual peer at El Toro.  Oswald was continually miffed that muscle heads outranked him in the Marines, said Thornley.

Regards,

--Paul Trejo

[Paul Trejo]

2 hours ago, James Norwood said:

Paul,

I feel sorry for anybody who relies on Priscilla Johnson McMillan in order to formulate opinions about Oswald.  Or, do you think that Priscilla's connections with NANA were innocent?

James

James,

Priscilla Johnson McMillan was a professional journalist in the international arena.   Insofar as the CIA predominated every legal and military venue in the international field of US relations, it is more than likely that she met her fair share of CIA agents in the international field.

Also, I have no doubt in my mind that Priscilla Johnson McMillan was and remains a loyal citizen of the USA, and so I have little doubt that if the CIA ever asked her for her journalistic support for this or that international transaction, that she would have been a willing assistant.

Yet, to assume on that basis alone that she was a CIA agent is, in my opinion, fundamentally absurd.

The CIA-did-it CTers go too far in their rank suspicion of anybody who comes close to a CIA agent.   For one famous example, the CIA-did-it CTers have claimed since the 1990's that because the mother-in-law of Ruth Paine had a childhood friend who later became a mistress of Allen Dulles, that this is somehow solid evidence that Ruth Paine "must have been" a CIA agent.

The emotional hysteria which presumes that Priscilla Johnson McMillan "must have been" a CIA agent is equally absurd. 

Regards,
--Paul Trejo

Edited September 21, 2017 by Paul Trejo

[Mathias Baumann]

11 hours ago, Paul Trejo said:

Mathias,

Do you doubt that a very intelligent young person, motivated, and spending virtually all of his or her free time for nine months studying Russian alphabet and Russian grammar, and struggling to read PRAVDA for all that time, could get a 50 percent score on a written Russian exam?

I don't doubt this.  Lee Harvey Oswald was a lonely guy with a lot of time on his hands at El Toro.

Kerry Thornley may have been his only intellectual peer at El Toro.  Oswald was continually miffed that muscle heads outranked him in the Marines, said Thornley.

Regards,

--Paul Trejo

Paul,

yes, being a language teacher I doubt that very much. I'll tell you why:

I recently talked to an American colleague of mine. He teaches English as a foreign language at our school. He's got a college degree and he's fluent in German. For about a year he's been taking lessons in Russian. He's had 300 individual lessons so far and has just passed his L1/R1 test. He got a "C" on it.

High school dropout Oswald reached level L2/R2 on his test. So this should give you a rough idea how remarkable his achievement truly is.

There's a reason why language schools still flourish in the age of YouTube. Learning a language all by yourself is extremely difficult, it takes a lot of discipline, motivation and talent. There's no indication in Oswald's school records that he possessed any of those skills in abundance.

So the most likely conclusion is that he was trained in Russian, probably at Monterey Language School.

Edited September 21, 2017 by Mathias Baumann

[Jim Hargrove]

2 hours ago, Mathias Baumann said:

So the most likely conclusion is that he was trained in Russian, probably at Monterey Language School.

Or that he learned Russian even earlier than that.

[Sandy Larsen]

16 hours ago, Paul Trejo said:

Sandy,

I have two sources for my claim that Lee Harvey Oswald taught himself Russian by using Berlitz.   The first is Priscilla Johnson McMillan, in her initial article on Oswald.  You probably know about that one.

But the second source is a sideways confirmation from Nelson Delgado.  Nelson was not particularly educated himself -- so this could explain why he insisted that Lee Harvey Oswald went to Berlin to learn Russian.  Here's the WC testimony:

Mr. LIEBELER - You say that you thought he was in Berlin going to school?
Mr. DELGADO - Yes. For some reason or other. I can't say right now why, but it just seemed to me that I thought he was going to school there.
Mr. LIEBELER - After you were discharged from the Marine Corps, you learned that Oswald had gone to the Soviet Union, did you not?
Mr. DELGADO - I knew he had gone to the Soviet Union before I got discharged...
Mr. LIEBELER - But even though you had heard before you had gotten out of the Marine Corps that Oswald had gone to the Soviet Union, while you were the Army in Germany you gained the impression that somehow that he was in Berlin, going to school?
Mr. DELGADO - Yes; in the university there.
Mr. LIEBELER - But you don't have any recollection of where you got this idea?
Mr. DELGADO - No...

They went around and around on this, but the logical conclusion is that Delgado saw a Berlitz book in Lee's possession there at El Toro, and misread it as Berlin.

Paul,

That seems reasonable to me. (But it was a book, not tapes.)

It's also possible that people around Delgado wondered aloud how Oswald had learned Russian, and that some suggested he might have used the Berlitz method. And in Delgado's mind that meant learning the language at a special school in Berlin.

I think my explanation is much more likely the case. Because had Delgado actually seen Oswald using the book, he would not have confused it for a school.

P.S. It appears that Priscilla Johnson McMillan has no source for her Berlitz assertion. (I'll bet it's also a Delgado thing.) I looked at some of her writing and it seems like she just makes stuff up. One thing that stands out is that she said that Oswald was a tall six footer... something like that. We all know the 5' 11' height is wrong.)

 

Edited September 21, 2017 by Sandy Larsen

[Mathias Baumann]

 

Jim,

if we look more closely at the results James Norwood posted you'll see that they support my opinion that Oswald was a second language learner.

 

On ‎19‎.‎09‎.‎2017 at 10:31 PM, James Norwood said:

Oswald's scores were as follows:   understanding (-5), reading (+4), writing (+3), with the composite +2 indicating that Oswald answered two more questions correctly than those that he missed on the exam.

Notice that he did pretty badly at understanding (=listening comprehension) in comparision to reading and writing. This is not surprising. Most second language learners struggle with listening comprehension. For various reasons for second language learners listening is much more difficult than reading: https://www.press.umich.edu/pdf/9780472034598-myth1.pdf.

If you're theory is correct and Oswald learned Russian as his native language when he was a child one would expect him to perform better in listening than in reading and writing, especially if he only attended elementary school.

[Mathias Baumann]

6 minutes ago, Sandy Larsen said:

Paul,

That seems reasonable to me. (But it was a book, not tapes.)

It's also possible that people around Delgado wondered aloud how Oswald had learned Russian, and that some suggested he might have used the Berlitz method. And in Delgado's mind that meant learning the language at a special school in Berlin.

I think my explanation is much more likely the case. Because had Delgado actually seen Oswald using the book, he would not have confused it for a school.

 

Sandy,

maybe Oswald attended a Berlitz School?

[Sandy Larsen]

4 hours ago, Mathias Baumann said:

High school dropout Oswald reached level L2/R2 on his test.

Mathias,

Can you give a rough estimate as to what age a native speaker of a language would need to be in order to test at the L2/R2 level? For example, would a 6th grader (11 years old) be at that level? An 8th grader?

 

[Sandy Larsen]

11 minutes ago, Mathias Baumann said:

Sandy,

maybe Oswald attended a Berlitz School?

Mathias,

Apparently there is no evidence that he attended a Berlitz School.

 

[Jim Hargrove]

1 hour ago, Mathias Baumann said:

Jim,

if we look more closely at the results James Norwood posted you'll see that they support my opinion that Oswald was a second language learner.

Hi again, Mathias,

I'm not so sure of your conclusion above, but hopefully Prof. Norwood will see this and comment on it.  The records, for what they're worth, indicate that Oswald never lived anywhere near Monterey while in the USMC, and there are no gaps in his records that would provide the kind of time needed for this kind of extensive training.  Even assuming those records would have been falsified to hide his Russian-language training, some of his Marine associates, Zack Stout for instance, are pretty clear that he didn't study Russian while they worked and bunked with him in Japan and earlier.

1 hour ago, Mathias Baumann said:

Notice that he did pretty badly at understanding (=listening comprehension) in comparision to reading and writing. This is not surprising. Most second language learners struggle with listening comprehension. For various reasons for second language learners listening is much more difficult than reading: https://www.press.umich.edu/pdf/9780472034598-myth1.pdf.

That's a reasonable point, but in a footnote in his article James also pointed out that Oswald scored roughly the same ("poor") in both his Russian and English tests.  The question arises whether dyslexia or some other test-taking disability had something to do with that strange outcome.

1 hour ago, Mathias Baumann said:

If you're theory is correct and Oswald learned Russian as his native language when he was a child one would expect him to perform better in listening than in reading and writing, especially if he only attended elementary school.

Again, a good point, but it hardly explains why tests of his Russian vs. English language skills would show roughly the same fluency in each.

[James Norwood]

1 hour ago, Mathias Baumann said:

 

Jim,

if we look more closely at the results James Norwood posted you'll see that they support my opinion that Oswald was a second language learner.

 

Mathias,

Please do not directly or indirectly put your words in my mouth.

It is apparent from your comments above that you did not ready my article.  Instead, you have already made up your mind that Oswald learned Russian as a second language. But you are offering only "opinion," as opposed to thoughtful conclusions based on research.

My article deflates the possibility that Oswald studied at Monterey , and it equally flattens the possibility of Oswald picking up Russian from individualized study using such methods as the Berlitz system.  

If you want to make a persuasive argument about Monterey, you need to demonstrate through primary evidence that Oswald was present at Monterey for a 48-week intensive language course.  If you want to make a persuasive argument about private study, you need eyewitnesses who actually saw Oswald using flash cards or studying Russian grammar in order to teach himself Russian.  No such evidence exists. 

Why don't you take the time to read the entire article, instead of spouting off about the piecemeal comments of this thread?

Edited September 21, 2017 by James Norwood

[Mathias Baumann]

23 minutes ago, Sandy Larsen said:

Mathias,

Apparently there is no evidence that he attended a Berlitz School.

 

Well, it seems that Nelson Delgado thought that Oswald was going to a language school.

50 minutes ago, Sandy Larsen said:

Mr. LIEBELER - You say that you thought he was in Berlin going to school?
Mr. DELGADO - Yes. For some reason or other. I can't say right now why, but it just seemed to me that I thought he was going to school there.

And so did the Warren Commission: http://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.de/2011/09/monterey-language-institute-presidio.html

So there might be a kernel of truth to that story.

32 minutes ago, Sandy Larsen said:

Mathias,

Can you give a rough estimate as to what age a native speaker of a language would need to be in order to test at the L2/R2 level? For example, would a 6th grader (11 years old) be at that level? An 8th grader?

 

An 8th or even 6th grader would normally be way beyond L2/R2. L2/R2 is defined as follows:

Limited working proficiency is rated 2 on the scale. A person at this level is described as follows:

• able to satisfy routine social demands and limited work requirements
• can handle with confidence most basic social situations including introductions and casual conversations about current events, work, family, and autobiographical information
• can handle limited work requirements, needing help in handling any complications or difficulties; can get the gist of most conversations on non-technical subjects (i.e. topics which require no specialized knowledge), and has a speaking vocabulary sufficient to respond simply with some circumlocutions
• has an accent which, though often quite faulty, is intelligible
• can usually handle elementary constructions quite accurately but does not have thorough or confident control of the grammar

You can read more about the different levels here --> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ILR_scale#ILR_Level_5_.E2.80.93_Native_or_bilingual_proficiency

[Paul Trejo]

2 hours ago, Mathias Baumann said:

Jim,

if we look more closely at the results James Norwood posted you'll see that they support my opinion that Oswald was a second language learner.

Notice that he did pretty badly at understanding (=listening comprehension) in comparision to reading and writing. This is not surprising. Most second language learners struggle with listening comprehension. For various reasons for second language learners listening is much more difficult than reading: https://www.press.umich.edu/pdf/9780472034598-myth1.pdf.

If you're theory is correct and Oswald learned Russian as his native language when he was a child one would expect him to perform better in listening than in reading and writing, especially if he only attended elementary school.

Mathias,

I believe that you -- as a language teacher -- have a greater insight into language learning skills of Lee Harvey Oswald.

Although Professor Norwood has 41 footnotes to his paper which presumes and then confirms with hearsay evidence that Lee Harvey Oswald was a Russian speaker before he joined the Marines -- your analysis of Oswald's test scores in Russian language quickly lay his theory to rest.

If Oswald was a native Russian speaker, then listening comprehension would have been his strongest suit in any case.  This is the science.  Instead, Oswald got his LOWEST scores in listening comprehension.  This makes Russian a second language for him -- scientifically.

The hearsay evidence provided by non-expert witnesses (even DeMohrenschildt's admitted guesswork) cannot ever decide the case.  Science can. 

In my opinion, Professor Norwood and even you, Mathias, fail to give Lee Harvey Oswald the credit he deserves for teaching himself Russian during the year 1959; and then getting himself IMMERSED in the Russian language from 1959-1962.  Immersion teaches listening comprehension, conversational skill as well as ACCENT. 

Also, since Lee Harvey Oswald was reading Karl Marx at age 15, we must give his intellect more credit than y'all are giving him.

Regards,
--Paul Trejo

Edited September 21, 2017 by Paul Trejo
typos