<p>I want to do the peace corps so I know spanish, french, portuguese, and chinese should be my priorities, but german and japanese are also on my list of must haves.
I speak spanish upper intermediate(can speak with people no problem ) and french upper begginer (can understand more than speak) and I can read some portuguese....I am going to only do 1 semester spanish in college because it is a program where all classes are taught in spanish, but which languages should I choose for the others?</p>
<p>Spanish-1 semester(includes trip to mexico)
French-how can i advance?
Portuguese-how to begin studying it?
Chinese- should i take this? I like asia, but honestly, japanese literature is my passion
Japanese-I want to do a summer in japan
German-grad school</p>
<p>I really want to go to grad school in a french/german speaking country in europe
I want to go to brazil , i love the language
french-a necessity
chinese- peace corps, i would love to go to china, my dream
japan- maybe a future place to live, i love their literature, murakami!
german-cool, I do not mind holding off on this one</p>
<p>You clearly have a passion for Japanese. I’m all about following your heart: that’s how you get to be GOOD at things. </p>
<p>You should have no problem finding Portuguese at most big universities. As to how to advance in French - there’s only one way. Using it. It may not be possible to advance rapidly without spending some time in a French speaking country – but you will keep getting to know the language better by at least reading it every day. When I lived in France, people told me to read the entire issue of Le Monde every day, and I’d get fluent within a year. I was fully immersed in French, so I don’t know to what extent it helped, but I did read it almost every day. These days, there’s lots of French language media online - check out the fairly new Huffington Post in French.</p>
<p>
That’s a good choice. There’s no reason to learn German unless you settle down in Germany or need reading knowledge of German for a graduate degree in the humanities. If your German is not immaculate, most Germans would actually rather talk to you in English. Odds are that your graduate degree program would be taught entirely in English too.</p>
<p>Learning Chinese is hard. There are generally 2 tracks at larger schools, for Chinese speakers and non-Chinese speakers. You can learn to speak but writing will take years and a ton of work. There is no alphabet. My lord, my kids would show me how hard it is to use a Chinese dictionary: to look up a word, you should know the order of the strokes by which it is made and then you go piece by piece. My oldest found that translating stories took 30+ hours a week at the college level. As you probably know, Japanese has this problem but they’ve moved so much to a simpler form that learning is more possible.</p>
<p>If you want to advance in French, and there is no time for classes or native speakers around,
watch movies in French. Lots of them</p>
<p>Universities with Brazilian programs have Portuguese. My kid studied on his on with cassette tapes and dictionaries and a book and learned enough to to do a long home stay in Brazil with a family who only spoke Portuguese. He also took a six week conversational language class for travelers.</p>
<p>Have you sat down and looked at places the Peace Corps is actually sending people these days? The ones I know are on Madagascar and in Africa! Spanish is region dependent and most of what is taught for conversational purposes in the US is for use in Central/South America- if you’re in Spain, you’ll understand most everything, but they may not get all of your’s! It’s going to be very difficult for you to develop fluency in either Japanese or Chinese if you haven’t had grounding in them up to now- it took me several years of living in Japan to be functional while my then 10 year old was chattering away in just a few months! If you spend a summer with a Japanese family, their kids are going to want to speak English with you, so you could work out an agreement to answer them in their own language!
D has several friends and acquaintances who are either in the Peace Corps or who are applying and now it takes more than just an interest or desire to live somewhere exotic( I’m sure that this doesn’t apply to the OP, but I’m writing it anyway!). They are looking for people with unusual qualifications and skills who can not only converse with the local populace but also head up projects with minimal supervision. Spanish will serve you well, and in your position, I’d take as much French as I could because it’s useful in Africa and Haiti, both of which require a lot of help. Hindi is useful as there are postings on the subcontinent but English is spoken there also. Portuguese will be a fairly easy lateral shift from Spanish, but as you know, it’s not spoken very widely.
You can search out the French/Spanish/German language news stations on cable and watch some of the Spanish nightime “soap operas” too. There is no substitute for speaking the languages though so see if there are “language houses” available on your college campus and join language clubs. There are also summer “immersion” programs on some campuses which are really a great way to hone your skills!</p>
<p>You can’t do everything, so I would make the hard decision to cut down to one ‘group’, in your case I think it should be European-focussed with Spanish and French.</p>
<p>If you got Spanish up to near-professional level and French as high as possible, you would be good for the Americas, most of Africa, and a lot of Europe. I think Portuguese is a diversion and not terribly useful.</p>
<p>but what about japanese? this is so difficult guys! I want to learn japanese no matter what…but french and spanish are my first priority…thanks everyone</p>
<p>If you know Spanish and French, Portuguese will be relatively easy, and opens opportunities in Brazil, a huge, quickly developing and increasingly important country economically and geopolitically</p>
<p>Japanese is rather hard due to the fact of its structure. It is much like chinese in this way.</p>
<p>I have studied it at my uni for two years… and you know what? Whilst i can keep up with some convorsations (whilst going slower… not at normal fast speed), i still feel like i know next to nothing. In fact, i still learn something new about it every day.</p>
<p>Like someone else said, spanish is highly depended on what region you go to. My grandfather can speak it (he grew up with it), but he cannot speak or even understand at times other dialects/versions of it.</p>
<p>I would also assume that french is similar in a way due to dialect differences.</p>
<p>I think there’s a real benefit to becoming fluent in a language - I’d pick one of your romance languages and got it up to snuff. In my life Spanish would have been much more useful than French since I have a surprising number of clients who would love to speak Spanish to me. (I’m an architect.) But achieving French fluency means I get by pretty well in Italian (took a semester as an adult). For me the only way to get fluent is to learn the basics and then spend a good chunk of time in the country completely immersed. I’d say for me - about four months to be comfortable, several years to achieve real fluency and I still found gaps. I learned the vocabulary that goes with pregnancy only after getting pregnant in Germany for example. </p>
<p>Anyway, if you have a passion for Japanese go ahead and take it - it won’t be useful for the Peace Corps, but it may be useful for something else in your life. But do consider finding a way to have an immersion experience in Japan otherwise you are highly unlikely to be really fluent.</p>
<p>I wouldn’t try to tackle more than two languages while you are in college.</p>
<p>Study languages you want to, not for a goal such as the Peace Corps. College is a great place to indulge in foreign languages for the fun of it. All enrich you.</p>
<p>The person we know who just ended her Peace Corps time was in the Ukraine, but the Peace Corps taught them Russian, not Ukrainian. She knew no Russian going in.</p>
<p>If you want to improve your French, you might consider a tutor instead of taking a class. With a tutor you can go as fast or slow as you like. Get one who will talk with you and read things with you. </p>
<p>You might also consider spending a summer at Middlebury’s language institute. It’s a full immersion program and should improve your language skills (in whatever language you choose) immensely.</p>
<p>If you really want to learn Japanese, then begin. You don’t have to wait for a college class. Get Pimsleur or Mango Languages (often available through public libraries) or a kana game or something else and START! If you decide to take a class to add structure to your learning, having a head start shouldn’t hurt and you could always try a placement test to see if you could start later in the sequence due to your self-taught learning.</p>
<p>Yes to wis75! Great advice! Take it to heart, OP.</p>