<p>Hey there,</p>
<p>I've been looking at the classes that I want to take next semester...I want to start with Russian but apparently the class meets 5 days/week?! Is this normal?
And is it necessary to attend every class?</p>
<p>My daughter found the same thing at her college - the requirement is 2 full years of language and classes meet M-F - Ugggh.</p>
<p>Some of those days might be laboratory days, where you must go to the language lab and do listening exercises and such.</p>
<p>I'm taking Elementary Japanese 2, and it meets MTWHF from 9:05-10:00. It is necessary when learning a language to practice a lot, hence meeting everyday. The class only counts for 4 hours, but it really meets 5 hours per week.</p>
<p>Absolutely normal! With a difficult language like Russian, it's essential to have that practice :) Oh I miss Russian... First year is always the hardest because you have to go at lightning speed to master almost all of the grammar.</p>
<p>I took elementary french this year and it met three times a week (Mondays and Thursdays for an hour and fifteen mins, Wednesdays for fifty mins).</p>
<p>Rister_Chutophs</p>
<p>I have a little theory that I would like to share with you...</p>
<p>The harder the language, the more times the class meets whilst one is at a beginners level. </p>
<p>If you can pull off the Monday through Friday schedule, then you should totally go for it. </p>
<p>Good luck to you (^_^)</p>
<p>Richmond's French and Spanish and perhaps Italian meet five day a week. It was 6 credit hours, now it's 2 units, I believe. There are speaking labs as well, so I <em>think</em> that they meet seven times a week in total (ouch), which is why I am taking Latin.</p>
<p>Yeah - unfortunately, that's normal. They start to meet less at upper-levels where you have a better grasp on the language.</p>
<p>Try looking for night classes of the language - they often meet fewer times per week.</p>
<p>Think about it: if you were trying to teach a reasonably fast-paced class in a language to people who were accustomed to a lot of hand-holding in language classes and who weren't already involved in social situations where the language was spoken, wouldn't you want them to spend a lot of time sitting with other people practicing speaking and listening to and reading the language and getting immediate feedback?</p>
<p>thanks people, i guess that makes sense. just didn't want to accept the fact that i have class on friday from 4 - 5 PM ;)</p>
<p>At my school, at least in the Romance language department, elementary courses are 5 times a week, intermediate courses are 4 times a week, and advanced classes are 3 times a week, all one hour each.</p>
<p>I would be wary of a language class that didn't meet at least 4 times a week. You can only learn so much from a textbook, and so much of learning a language is listening to the accent and looking at visuals.</p>
<p>It's definitely normal, but take heart...at Wellesley, introductory language classes like the one you are thinking of taking always meet at 8:30 am (our earliest time slot). Not that I have the stamina anyway to pick up Chinese or Japanese or Arabic, but...ouch. I have great admiration of those who stick with those 8:30 languages!</p>
<p>Haha, I thought MTWRF was some variation on *** until I realized R means Thursday (I've never seen that before). To answer your question though... YES, college language classes are almost always everyday because they want to bombard you with the new language as much as possible, which is the only way to learn it. Also don't be surprised to have tons of practice every night (busy work). </p>
<p>Try doing it any other way, you will fail. Unless you're naturally gifted at languages, in which case you should self study the intro classes (definitely possible) and move into the advanced ones, which meets less frequently and gives less work.</p>
<p>Oh, I didn't know CC still censors. *** is the third, second and fifth letters in MTWRF.</p>