<p>I interested in learning multiple languages over the course of my college career, but I was wondering if taking 2+ languages a year would be difficult and time consuming. Has anyone done it? Advice?</p>
<p>Just an opinion: College is really expensive and most schools offer a breadth and depth of coursework that will not be available to you except as a student. Languages, on the other hand, can be learned at any community college or with a private instructor at any time in your life. I’m not saying don’t study a language in college at all - in fact, advanced study in one or more languages may be essential for your career goals - but intro classes in lots of languages are not the highest value added that you can get out of a college education.</p>
<p>Depends what you want to do, and your facility in learning languages. It’s fairly common for classics majors to study Latin and Greek at the same time. It’s not uncommon for Romance language majors to study 2 Romance languages—some combination of French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian. A Latin American Studies major might also profitably study Spanish and Portuguese or Spanish and French. A Middle Eastern Studies major might study Arabic and Hebrew or Arabic and Farsi; a South Asian Studies major, Hindi-Urdu and ancient Sanskrit or some other major contemporary Indian language; an East Asian Studies major, Mandarin and Japanese, and so on. But I agree with M’s Mom that you don’t want to spend a lot of college time in intro-level courses, or in the study of random languages. If it’s part of a focused plan, and especially if you’re moving to an advanced level in one or more languages, it can be a very positive thing. Where I disagree with M’s Mom, though, is with the suggestion that languages are so easy to pick up that you can just do that anytime, anywhere. The sad fact is, most of us don’t; in fact, most U.S. college graduates don’t achieve an advanced level of fluency in even a single foreign language. IMO, it’s one of the great shortcomings of our educational system.</p>
<p>Or someone planning to do graduate work in a language might also study a different language, because many grad programs require at least a reading knowledge of a third (and sometimes a fourth) language. And many grad programs in linguistics require that you master multiple languages, including at least one non-Indo European. </p>
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<p>I personally would look at why you are studying language. Are you going to major in language? or Do you just want to do it to know how to speak different languages?</p>
<p>Honestly I would advise against it, no one I know has ever liked a foreign language class in college till they were in more advanced classes. There are many people who go for spring or summer semesters to a third world country like Mexico and pub crawl to avoid taking it; just because most intro to language classes are giant and filled with some of the worst students in college (many colleges use freshmen Spanish or French to fail out undesirables.)</p>
<p>If you are just doing it to do it, or doing because you think you will land a job because you took multiple languages please reconsider. I have no idea why so many people are fascinated with learning foreign language, my parents gardener is fluent in Spanish, Portuguese, and French (not much English) yet he is proof that being fluent in many languages really does not matter when looking for work.</p>
<p>There are several websites you can find that are devoted to discussion of learning foreign languages, although many are from the perspective of the independent learner. You might want to ask your question on one or two of those boards since its a more targeted audience. I have no idea personally whether its possible or enjoyable to do what you’re thinking about. One other thought when school starts back up in the fall is to look up the language clubs at some colleges that may be near you and see if its possible to attend a meeting just to chat with the students.</p>
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<p>Well, I can think of at least one counterexample. My D1 took both Intermediate Portuguese and Accelerated Beginning and Accelerated Intermediate French (each of the accelerated French classes compressing a normal year’s worth of French into a single semester, for twice the credits) at the University of Minnesota, as a HS homeschooler attending the U under the state of Minnesota’s PSEO program, in which the state pays for qualified HS students to take college classes. It was a lot of work, and sometimes difficult to keep the two languages straight, but she got a lot out of it, not least a huge amount of intellectual satisfaction, and it propelled her French to the point that she was able to start with advanced-level French literature and writing classes as a freshman at her LAC this past year. Having conquered as much French as she feels she needs right now, she’s shifting gears and once again picking up Latin and Greek in the fall of her sophomore year, languages she had studied in junior high and her first two years of HS but suspended in favor of French and Portuguese for her last 2 years of HS.</p>
<p>Waste of time? I don’t think so. Her Portuguese is serviceable (and could easily be brushed up to very good with a quick conversational refresher course or, better, a few weeks’ stay in Portugal or Brazil), her French is excellent (she could easily study or work in France or some other Francophone country), and if you’re going to study literature in college there’s as much to be gained from French as from English literature. As for Latin and Greek, she really thrives on reading the classics in the original, and there’s an enormous wealth of literary and philosophical ideas in those ancient texts that many people still find profoundly meaningful today. What she’ll do with it, who knows, but I think she’s getting an outstanding education at a school that values both classical and modern languages and literatures as a perfectly respectable branch of intellectual endeavor. I think it’s unfortunate that so many Americans, even well-educated Americans, tend to brush off languages and foreign literatures as a kind of afterthought or something of secondary importance.</p>
<p>I hope to work for the government in a position abroad, and I want to break the language barrier during my work. But most government workers abroad speak Romance Languages/Arabic/Mandarin, I want to take it further and fill in the gaps with knowledge of less commonly used languages such as Bengali and such.</p>