<p>I was placed in LSP but my ultimate goal is a Major in Classics so with my one elective what would be a good class to help me towards the requirements for this major. I was thinking Elementary Greek or Elementary Latin but I open for suggestions. Also, I was looking to take a French class but it seems too time consuming so I was thinking about just doing Speak Freely Level 3 for a semester to see if it was a subject I would want to pursue more seriously. Can anyone give me insight into the quality of this program??? One of my ultimate goals is fluency so I was wondering how this program would negatively or positively affect that aspiration....</p>
<p>Speaking Freely is nice in that you can practice your foreign language skills in a more relaxed setting without having to worry about what grade you’ll get. The groups often practice in context, so for instance, you’ll go to a French restaurant and interact in French. Since people learn new languages better through immersion, the program definitely does help since it gives you a chance to really practice French. However, depending on the group, you might not be meeting as frequently as the schedule implies, or you might have people who aren’t as invested in the program as you are. </p>
<p>As for whether Speaking Freely has anything to do with studying French…not so much. The French department at NYU is made up of two sections: the classes people take just to get the language requirement out of the way, and everything else, which is then separated into French Language and French Studies (or something to that effect). I minored in French Language, and I swear, I have never seen such inconsistency in the quality of professors. I felt like the higher up I went in class level, the worse it got. The department employs French grad students and French individuals living in the city, and a great number of them were stereotypically snobby about “their” language. On the flip side, the professors on the culture/history/literature side are all, according to friends who did that major, amazing professors. The dichotomy is so weird. But anyway, if you do French Language, you’re basically just learning the same sort of stuff you would in high school, and then you move into the Contemporary classes (which are supposed to emphasize a more modern version of French, but whether or not they do depends on the prof) as well as some advanced classes (like Translation). I don’t think the lower language classes and Contemporary classes are too time-consuming, but Translation took up far too much of my time since my prof never really taught us idioms or anything like that but only critiques our piecemeal sentences.</p>
<p>as for your first question, i would just go with Elementary Latin I. Latin is just all memorization, and you’ll need proficiency up to the Intermediate Level (i think four classes?) in both Latin and Greek to graduate. but start with Latin.</p>