<p>All of the universities in my state (for admission) require either 2 years of a second language in high school, or 2 quarters of a second language at a community college, or other college. A varietly of language proficiency tests are also acceptable (including a passing score on the SAT subject test and AP test </p>
<p>I am currently a community college student without two years of a second language in highschool. Only Spanish and German are offered in my community college, but I want to major in Chinese after transfering to the 4 year university.</p>
<p>Therefore, it seems backward to take a year or Spanish or German (or sign language), just to get into the U of O to take Chinese. (the state is Oregon). It would also delay my graduation by a year.</p>
<p>Instead, would it be okay to take a year of Chinese from an online college?</p>
<p>The only traditional college I can find that offers online course in Chinese is the University of Haiwaii, but they are expensive.</p>
<p>(ps. I already emailed this question to the uni, but sometimes these universities take weeks to answer questions)</p>
<p>PPs. It’s of course acceptable if my “online chinese courses” are not accreditted or recognized by the U of O, but I use my knowledge obtained from them to simply pass an AP exam.</p>
<p>This would be the lease expensive way to do it… in fact, I’ll probably take this route.</p>
<p>I was not comfortable with any solutions to that problem. I’ll just take two qarters of Spanish. I may be overestimating my aplitude for languages, but how marketable would I be with -some- profficienty in Spanish, Chinese and a minor in Business and a major in Chinese?</p>
<p>Would I be more marketable if my major were in English and minor in Business?</p>
<p>First of all, I wouldn’t suggest an online course in a foreign language. Actually, I wouldn’t suggest ANY foreign language course where you’re not being actively immersed in the environment (and I don’t mean “18 hours of language lab required each week” either). The two years of a foreign language concept is becoming increasingly important with the rate of immigration to the United States and the globalization of the world, but you won’t be able to say you speak Spanish or Chinese in an interview for an international firm (at least as I understand it) unless you have obtained truly native-like fluency (which is almost impossible if you began learning the language after adolescence – there will always be some artifacts of your first language present because of the way the brain organizes non-native languages differently).
My suggestion would be to focus on your community college experience and find some organizations with a lot of Chinese-speaking individuals (in your community) and go through the painful process of immersing yourself there. Through full immersion (i.e., in country immersion w/ some coaching/tutoring/classes to give a framework to what you’re learning), it is possible to pick up a language and obtain respectable fluency (60-80%) in as little as 4-6 months (Chinese may take longer if you have no background in it as it is so different from English…I would guess at least double that, maybe triple in country)</p>
<p>Not that this is what you said, but I disagree with the common assertion that learning a language is “nearly impossible” as an adult.</p>
<p>I’ve lived in Germany and the Philippines, and if they (or other foreigners) can learn English as adults, why not the other way? Adult Americans use that reasoning as an excuse not to put in the proper effort. I’m guilty too, since I never picked up much German or Tagalog. It’s easy to get by in the Philippines only speaking English… not enough need to learn Tagalog if every Filipino speaks English. But if it’s a matter of survival to learn another language, I think the brain is quite capable regardless of age. </p>
<p>I’ve also known some polyglots who can pick up several languages as adults with relatively little effort.</p>
<p>Anyway, My CC is small, and I don’t know if there is a Chinese community–but there are Chinese communities and language programs in the city I plan to move to after graduation. The University offers 190 study abroad programs in 87 countries. (Actually, apparently they have the best public Mandarin programs in the country) I could also set up an immersion thing in Mexico myself.</p>
<p>The University said online courses are fine (for the purpose of admission), only that they have to be accredited. I’ve found two colleges in the US that offer online Chinese courses</p>
<p>There is a HUGE difference between gaining native-like fluency and learning a language! If you are hoping to do business in another country and your interviewer has a choice between an advanced learner and a natively fluent speaker of both languages, the native speaker is most likely to win hands down other factors being equal (or close to it). Psychological research has repeatedly shown that adult learners are limited in what we can learn. I, for one, am fluent in Spanish (according to native speakers) and learned it as an adult (started in HS and really gained fluency abroad during college and using it constantly at work, etc., post-college), but I would not claim that I am bilingual and I certainly don’t sound like a native speaker myself. I make many of the mistakes typical of a second language learner – errors with articles, uncertainty at times as to which preposition to use, English-like grammatical structures that, while correct in Spanish, do not <em>sound</em> like those of a native speaker, etc. I agree you can learn the language as an adult, but you should not expect to sound truly native unless you started to learn it as a child. This has been shown with late ASL learners (who are deaf and therefore rely upon ASL as their primary form of communication). For those who begin learning ASL later in life (usually b/c parents resisted teaching them ASL early on in hopes they would learn to lip-read, etc.), their fluency may be great, but their grammar and so forth never gets beyond about 75%! It is interesting to note that the mistakes are systematic and predictable – primarily concerning articles and prepositions (the same things that tend to be such a problem for second language learners of verbal languages as well).
Neuroscience has even shown why these limitations exist! (Children who learn both languages simultaneously have the language center of their brains actually overlapping between languages, that is, the two languages share neurons, whereas adult learners tend to have their language centers divided, with the primary language taking up most of the area and then the brain basically grabbing whatever it can of the nearby association cortex in order to process the secondary language)</p>
<p>I don’t care if foreigners “sound native” or have native-like fluency. The goal is communication. And the goal of the online courses is to gin admittance into the university, where I will go on to have many Chinese classes and periods of study abroad.</p>
<p>Then go for the class. I’m not saying you shouldn’t learn the language. My suggestion was simply to go for something that will immerse you. In my experience (that is, the experience of myself and peers who have learned a second language), the stronger you become in the language (that is, the closer to be fully fluent you are), the more you actually want to be able to be truly (native-like) bilingual, because you realize just how far you are from that and how limited your ability to communicate in the other language still is. I think the goal of everyone is communication; it’s really more of a question of just how well you hope to communicate. (Heck…many native English speakers I’ve met can hardly express themselves in writing or verbally in their own language…much less with clarity in it!)</p>