Son signed up for beginning Chinese for his first semester in college. He’s a smart young man and had a 4.0 in high school. His only language courses have been Latin. I’m concerned that since Chinese is considered one of the toughest languages to learn that even a beginning Chinese course might drop his first semester GPA. Anyone have any thoughts on this? Is freshman year too late to start Chinese?
IN addition to Chinese,he is taking 2 poly sci courses, macroeconomics, and one other course first semester.
The content and approach would vary at different institutions, but at my daughter’s school, the first and even the second year of Chinese focused on the spoken language (and the phonetic written Pinyin) not on reading and writing the characters. Spoken Mandarin is much easier to learn than most other languages, because there aren’t the different verb tenses, feminine/masculine articles etc. My daughter enjoyed it, and would have continued with the third and fourth years, if they hadn’t replaced the teacher with one she felt was useless (but who had an advanced degree.)
My daughter easily got A’s in the class - She did have a few years of Chinese as a small child,(ages 2 to 7) but her knowledge didn’t go beyond the colors, names of foods, and a few songs. Mostly she just has a better accent than someone who started from scratch as an adult.
You could check the grading policies, ratings of the professor on ratemyprofessor to find out more about potential effect on GPA, but in general it shouldn’t be a difficult class.
Let’s put it in perspective. If he masters the language and gets Cs, he’ll be better off and more marketable. With that said, that outcome is unlikely if he applies himself.
The point is to learn. Chasing grades at the expense of learning is a waste of an education.
Another thing to consider is depending on the Chinese language instructor concerned, most IME tend to be quite understanding of the difficulties involved for someone coming from a non-Chinese/character based language and grade him/her accordingly.
On the flipside, as I had some exposure to Chinese by speaking it at home without learning the characters, I was graded much more severely by the same instructors which makes logical sense.
Out of curiosity, which college is your D taking Mandarin Chinese. Feel free to PM if you don’t feel comfortable disclosing it directly on the thread.
The first and second-year courses at the Chinese language programs I’ve attended/know of(Oberlin, Harvard, Princeton) emphasized both.
At Oberlin, in addition to learning pinyin and the spoken Mandarin language, we were expected to learn around 25 new characters a week from the very first week of first-year Chinese onwards. And they started us on traditional Chinese characters first to provide us with some foundation before introducing simplified characters use in Mainland China in the second year alongside the traditional characters.
Considering the workload involved, the first 2 years of Chinese were allocated 5 as opposed to 3 credits so each Chinese language course was almost equivalent to 2 regular college courses.
It might be the Chinese language Profs I’ve had, but the only times I know of where they handed out Cs or worse is if the student clearly demonstrated he/she didn’t care about the course by not showing up to class for a while, not turning in assignments/showing up for quizzes/exams, showing up to class stoned, and/or being needlessly antagonistic to the Profs/other classmates in the class.
In short, you really had to show you were not putting in the effort or being an exceedingly disruptive/antagonistic jerk.
There are speakers of European languages who have a lot of trouble with Chinese tones. If he has any musical training, especially vocal experience, that helps a ton.
IMHO, 4 courses are plenty for first semester even if one of them isn’t Chinese.
Chinese is a very tonal language, in which the way you say something can make a huge difference in the word’s meaning. If your son wants to give it a go, then he should totally try it out. Freshman year in college is a good time to try out new things.
Most advisers to first-year students would be extremely reluctant/refuse to sign off on a student taking more than 4 regular classes. OP’s S seems to be taking 4 regular classes AND Chinese…which I wouldn’t recommend for any student unless he/she was unusually hard working and/or quick at juggling a class overload situation.
In fact, if a student took 4 regular classes and first/second year Chinese at my undergrad when I attended, you’d need to go to the academic dean to get a waiver to do so unless one was a Conservatory/double degree student*. A waiver which is only provided to students who have had a prior track record of doing well…which means first-years rarely get it.
The Con routinely requires students to take credit loads exceeding the maximum set by the College so Con students operate by a different rulebook than those of us who are only in the college.
Chinese is the only language I’ve tried to learn and realized I was not going to be able to master. I just didn’t have a good enough ear to hear or reproduce the tones. I rather liked learning characters though I never learned more than a few hundred. The grammar seemed actually pretty easy.
There are people who are naturals at language learning and others for whom it is a lot more work. I belong to the latter group, but learned to speak both French and German fairly fluently thanks to immersion experiences and being willing to spend more time practicing than others in my class needed to. My younger son is similar to me. He took Latin in high school and the B his teacher gave him in Latin 4 was a gift. (He regularly flunked tests, but always did his homework and aced anything that involved knowing mythology or Roman history.) He majored in International Relations in a program that required four years of a language - he took Arabic which the State Department deems to be one of the most difficult languages to learn. He got a C+ the first year, spent the summer after freshman year in Jordan and got B’s the second year. He spent his entire junior year in Jordan and got A’s as a senior. His GPA was sufficiently lowered by his Arabic grades that there were internships and programs he couldn’t apply for. Was it worth it? The jury is still out. He hasn’t had a use for his Arabic yet, but he’s applying to be a Naval Officer and apparently knowing a critical language may be wroth a bump in pay.
I do agree with the poster who said that freshman year in college is a time to try out new things. I also think that taking a course that requires regular study is a good balance with courses that are more dependent on a midterm, final and perhaps a longer paper.
Four courses with one Chinese, seems like a reasonable load.
I do agree that taking 5 classes, with one being Chinese, may be too much.
@mathmom , the foreign service usually bumps Arabic speakers to the top of their list for hiring (if they’ve passed the test). Can’t seem to find enough of them!
Same at Harvard. It’s also a 5 day/week class with a boatload of work outside of class, I am told. As others have said, I don’t know what’s the norm at son’s school, but at mine, you will not get approval for 5 classes as a first-semester freshman. So while taking Chinese might be OK, taking it with 4 other classes is probably overkill.
This may or may not be relevant, but my son, who hated Spanish in high school, started Japanese his freshman year at Oberlin, and ended up loving it. His second semester, he had Japanese, econ, comp sci, and environmental science (both had labs) and still made straight As. He did have to work his tail off, though.
That sounds like a typical academic load I would take during my undergrad…likely as much as 15 credits depending on whether one or 2 of the courses with labs counted as 4 credits to account for extra lab time. .
Taking 4 regular courses along with first/second year Chinese would likely end up being 17+ credits which would require a waiver from the academic dean to be allowed and seldom allowed for first-years…especially in the first semester unless one was a Con/Double-Degree student.
My D took Mandarin in college her first two years; last year she went to Spain fall semester and couldn’t continue Chinese in the spring since they’re year long courses. As Hanna said, my D noticed students who were musical had a much easier time with the tonal inflections (she’s a cellist.) She’s a Spanish and Creative Writing double major at Emory and elected Chinese for fun. Chinese was one of 4 regular courses she took (not including orchestra and a health class) for 18 credits a semester and made straight A’s, but it was a lot of work. Chinese classes meet 3 times a week (5 credits) and I believe she did had to get a departmental waiver.