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Randall Jeppesen, KSL NewsradioFor the first time, BYU is offering high school students a summer camp where they can start learning Arabic or Chinese. It's part of a government program to get more people to learn what they call critical languages.
Kirk Belnap is the director of the Middle East Language Resource Center at BYU. He says the nearly month-long language camp will be a complete emersion experience. "People shouldn't be thinking of this as, they are going to come and they're going to be stuck in a classroom and going to be doing, you know, verb conjugations."
The students will live with Arabic or Chinese speakers, they'll eat authentic food from the culture, visit mosques and more. Belnap says the reason for the camp is, "There's a critical shortage of people with, who are fluent in these languages."
It's part of the National Security Language Initiative.
