<p>I'm going to take Latin :) It kind of helps with my major: english and philosophy.</p>
<p>I see no one's addressed simplified or traditional Chinese. China uses simplified Chinese, where the characters are well, simplified. In English terms I suppose it'd be abbreviations or slang of whole words. Hong Kong, Taiwan, and a couple other places use traditional Chinese.</p>
<p>Now being the biased person I am, I love traditional. It looks much better and if you know traditional, you can read simplified. But anyways, do colleges teach traditional or simplified?</p>
<p>And then for hardcore Mandarin learners, you can learn the Chinese alphabet of bopomofo. For those whose computers can read it, stuff like ㄅㄆㄇㄈ. This alphabet spells out how the word is pronounced. But.... that's a LOT harder, but makes pronouncing words much easier and you can just write out the sound if you forget one of the hundred gazillion Chinese characters.</p>
<p>Wazzup - wouldn't an Arabic and Farsi combination be confusing since they share mostly the same letters but pronounce some things differently? I know that even with Spanish and Latin, I get confused with words sometime...</p>
<p>And as to what colleges teach, I always assumed that it would be simplified, as it's the more widely used form. But Columbia ONLY teaches traditional, which i think is lame. Georgetown teaches both - you can choose which - and i think that the majority of schools do this method. or at least i hope.</p>
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Wazzup - wouldn't an Arabic and Farsi combination be confusing since they share mostly the same letters but pronounce some things differently? I know that even with Spanish and Latin, I get confused with words sometime...
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<p>That is true. However, if you are a person who is relatively good with languages it shouldnt be a problem with some practice... There are pros and cons I guess.. Knowing the script would be a plus though because you wouldnt have go to spend a whole lot of time on learning a new and different script again.</p>
<p>I'm still in high school, but I'm an American taking both Mandarin and Arabic, no background in either, and I took two years of Italian. I get a lot of confused stares from parents on conference nights, but I think neither of these languages are that much more difficult than Italian, Spanish etc. The tones for me weren't too bad to get the hang of, but there are other white kids in my class who are failing miserably and are pretty much unintelligible with their tones. A lot of it is just buckling down to study. At the very beginning I never thought I'd be able to memorise characters well, but it's gotten easier and easier for me as I go along. There aren't any verb conjugations to memorise =D</p>
<p>We use simplified in class, and I started out with the goal of learning the traditional form of everything we learned as well, but with other work piling up I've been only about half successful with that.</p>
<p>As for Arabic, like someone said the grammar is fairly regular, there aren't a gazillion exceptions. I find it to be easier than Chinese, I guess in part because there's an alphabet, but my Chinese characters look much better than my Arabic writing (I could never write in script very well).</p>
<p>Drew00, I plan on majoring in English and Philosophy too! </p>
<p>Latin always really interested me; part of me wishes that I would have taken that in high school. Instead I took French, and I loved it, but sometimes I wish I had more scheduling/academic freedom to study more languages. It seems like such a huge commitment though.</p>
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I find it to be easier than Chinese, I guess in part because there's an alphabet, but my Chinese characters look much better than my Arabic writing (I could never write in script very well).
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<p>It's all practice.. Good luck!</p>
<p>Im am going to be a junior in high school and am going to take my 6th year of french(the 6th being AP), but I problably wont persue it in college. Although Im pretty good at it, I have no passion for learning french. Would love to visit france sometime tho</p>
<p>I've taken four years of Latin in high school, and it's wonderful and useful for all of the reasons that have already been mentioned, but I can't help wondering if I'm going to have trouble with spoken languages as a result. (I'm interested in Serbo-Croatian, German, and Italian)</p>
<p>I signed up for Portuguese101 in the fall at UGA...</p>
<p>I refused to take spanish in HS, almost didnt graduate, but i beat them. Im not learning a labguage of some dumb spics.</p>
<p>This is America learn English.</p>
<p>wow ok, no wonder you're a special ed student.</p>
<p>how hard would it be to start taking arabic in college with no prior arabic background or anything
I've been taught spanish since elementary school...</p>
<p>Special ed, yeah right try Honors</p>
<p>But il take that as a compliment as advanced student whos are gifted are also special education students. bet ya didnt know that.</p>
<p>I don't think it'd be too bad. Though the alphabet is different Arabic still uses an alphabet, so it doesn't take too long to learn & get accustomed to it. In terms of other language elements the grammar has a lot in common with Spanish, as was already mentioned, and it's not really any more difficult than the Romance languages, just different.</p>
<p>thanks budgiekid90 for your reply
Would it take alot of time outside class doing assignments and studying as compared to a language say liek spanish?</p>
<p>do you think as a freshman next year, taking calc 1 (never had precalc/calc before, only algebra 4/trig), chem 1, a "first year tutorial (lots of reading/writing/oral stuff), and chinese 1 (never had any chinese before either) would be too difficult of a course load?</p>
<p>simply put: would adding chinese to chem, calc, and tutorial be too much? (rather than another, maybe "easier" language)?</p>
<p>arabic grammer is similar to spanish grammer? Really, i didn't know that...</p>
<p>maybe that'll make learning arabic eventually a litttle easier</p>
<p>bcon, from my experience Arabic isn't any more time consuming than say a Romance language, but no doubt all language classes require more study time in college compared to high school so I'm probably not the best person to tell you.</p>
<p>ustas06, I don't know what the workload is like for college freshmen, but I'd guess in terms of the work difference between Chinese and another language it'd be worst, though not that bad depending on how much effort you're willing to put in and whether you're a "natural," the first term, and eventually the difference is less pronounced. Once you get the tones down pretty well it seems perfectly natural to speak with them for the most part, and learning characters takes less time in general even though they get more complicated. I think a lot of it is just the mindset you have going in, if you approach with the attitude of "omg Chinese! I'll never get used to this weird tone stuff, and, THOUSANDS of characters! Ahh!" you'll have a harder time. Once the novelty factor wears off, if there is one for you, things settle down.</p>