The notion of "catching the ability to interpret" or the "just as I do school" was popular when the field of interpreting for the deaf began to blossom in the U.S. in the 1960s. This learning by imitation has proven itself to be a remarkably unsuccessful pedagogical technique. The present article attempts to formulate an answer as to how to teach people to become interpreters by discussing the situation at Gallaudet University which stresses the need for intralanguage skills such as paraphrasing and shadowing before expecting stuents to work across language boundaries.