<p>So I'm an incoming freshman in the fall and can't decide which lang to study (I'm in WCAS). Right now I've narrowed it down to either Spanish or Chinese. I've taken Spanish up to my junior year in HS but I stopped after that. From what I've seen on this board, it seems like lang is pretty tough in general. My questions: 1) how much time do you have to commit to earn a reasonably good grade (A or B+)? 2) What can I expect as far as grading & assignments? 3) how tough is learning Chinese w/o any background knowledge at all?</p>
<p>Hm.. have you taken the placement test for Spanish? (Oh, when do we have to do this by anyway)</p>
<p>chinese (mandarin) is supposed to be one of the hardest languages in the world to learn.</p>
<p>fluent mandarin speakers (who also speak english) are in very high demand in the business world as many companies do business with china.</p>
<p>S2540S2: haven't taken the placement test...I'm probably just going to start over again so it will hopefully be a GPA booster if I decide to take Spanish</p>
<p>so anyone have any info on how intro mandarin courses are at NU?</p>
<p>i don't know about mandarin but i knew someone who took japanese and it was... not easy.</p>
<p>there are so many characters to learn, and so many grammatical differences from english, so many different phonemes, it makes any non-european language very hard to learn.</p>
<p>any language with a different alphabet is going to have a whole different dimension of difficulty from any language that is written with the regular alphabet.</p>
<p>as far as mandarin courses themselves, sorry i don't know.</p>
<p>"i don't know about mandarin"</p>
<p>My friend took it...The class met every day of the week. He had to learn tons and tons of characters and had quizzes very often.... After a quarter of that, he didn't bother taking another... He's also an engineering student!</p>
<p>but go ahead and add another 0 to your salary if you graduate fluent in mandarin and decide to go into business :)</p>