<p>Now, I'm interested in foreign languages, so I plan on taking one during my college years. By foreign language, I do not mean French or Spanish or the Western type. I mean: Arabic, Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, and Russian among others.</p>
<p>Does anyone have any experience with the classes at UF? How hard are they? How are the teachers? Does it seem like the students genuinely care about learning the language (this has been a major let down in high school)?</p>
<p>Thanks,
ansar</p>
<p>PS - Input on Japanese or Russian would be appreciated the most, since I'm leaning towards one of those two.</p>
<p>From what I’ve heard, the language professors at UF are extremely good (of course, there may be a few exceptions). Just like high school, there are inevitably going to be some students who are only taking the class because of the language requirement, but those students generally chose to take ASL or one of the Romance languages.</p>
<p>The difficulty of the classes really depends on you more than the actual classes. Since you are obviously interested in learning languages, the classes probably won’t be too difficult for you and you could probably get away with studying for 30 min or so a night. Just be aware that you will have to go to class 5 days a week and you really can’t miss more than a few days. So even though they aren’t that hard, they are time consuming.</p>
<p>My roommate took Chinese and Japanese her freshman year and said that Japanese was quite a bit harder than Chinese, but she did skip Beginning Japanese I so that could have been why. She’s very good at languages, rarely studied, and made B’s in both classes.</p>
<p>I know a number of people that majored in Russian at UF and although I don’t know much about the program, I can tell you that by the time they graduated they were all able to speak Russian fluently or very close to it. I never heard them complain about any of their classes, so I am guessing it’s not too difficult. I have met a few of the professors that teach Russian and they seemed very nice. Also, there are a number of programs through UF that allow students to go to Russia for a semester or even longer which really helps with learning the language. All of my friends that majored in Russian have gone to Russia at least once while at UF.</p>