This is more for people who are/were students at Harvard or are more familiar with Harvard academics, but how plausible is it to study two languages during my undergraduate years? I’ve taken Spanish for 3 years in high school and want to pick it back up in college because it’s such a useful language, but I also really love Japanese and I’ve always wanted to learn it and to study abroad in Tokyo. Obviously, taking one language is the norm to fulfill the foreign language requirement, but does anyone know if it’s at all doable to learn two?
It depends upon how far up the proficiency chain you want to go. If you are starting one language from scratch, while it is possible to do, it is not easy.
You need 32 courses to graduate. Your concentration will require 12+, plus 8 gen ed courses, plus 1 expository writing course, which leaves you with about 11 courses to play with. The reality, however, is that trying to schedule these foreign language classes around your requirements will be a logistical challenge as most courses required for your concentration do not offer multiple sections and may only be offered once per year or once every other year.
Additionally, most intro language courses, and many intermediate and advanced language classes meet 5x/week and the out-of-class time commitment is high.
If you get accepted and decide to matriculate, you will have plenty of opportunities to review with your advisor(s). Good luck.
It depends on one’s concentration. Some concentrations will incorporate study of one or more languages. As an example, most Classics concentrators study both Latin and Greek, and often a variety of other languages, both formally through coursework, and informally through self-study and other academic opportunities.
Here’s something to consider:
On the one hand, college is a great time to learn a language, because you have time and freedom to devote to study, and colleges have good instructors and facilities for learning languages, as well as upper level courses on culture and literature that are difficult to find elsewhere. On the other hand, learning a language at a place like Harvard is arguably a very poor use of your time there.
Harvard’s great strength is its faculty, but its actual faculty is barely engaged in introductory language instruction. At Harvard and other universities, introductory language courses in living languages are taught by native-speaker instructors who don’t necessarily have strong academic credentials because they are not doing academic work, exactly. There’s little reason to believe that Harvard’s language instructors are any better than any other college’s language instructors. What’s more, anyone would tell you that to really learn a language you have to go live for a decent period of time in a place where everyone is speaking it all day, every day. Which isn’t Harvard. So, in the end, in order to learn a new language at Harvard you pretty much have to commit to spending a great deal of your college career NOT studying with Harvard faculty, NOT associating with other Harvard students, and not even being at Harvard. Which is kind of a pity, because you only get eight semesters over four years of being a Harvard undergraduate. Meanwhile, there are other institutions that probably do a better job than Harvard of teaching people a new language – say, Middlebury, or the Defense Language Institute in Monterrey.
Different people can resolve that conundrum differently. One of my Harvard cousins was an East Asian Studies major, and she essentially devoted a good 40% of her college career to learning Japanese, including an entire junior year in Kyoto. She did get to study with Harvard’s sensational EAS faculty, too, and she lived in Japan for over a decade after college. But she missed a lot of Harvard. Other people may defer language studies to their summers, or to post-bac programs, or do a pre-college gap year in immersive language study.
While true, I would have phrased it differently. At Harvard and other universities, introductory language courses in living languages are almost always taught by native-speaker instructors who are non-ladder faculty (i.e. tenure is not in their future).
Recently, a friend mentioned that her daughter, and many of her female friends who graduated college and are now working, need help from their parents to pay their rent, as their jobs are just not paying enough to cover their expenses here in New York City. That’s not the case with my son, who graduated last May with a computer science job, found an apartment in Manhattan, furnished it, and has easily been able to pay the rent and start making monthly 401K deposits. I queried him on the issue and below was his response.
Not to discourage anyone from studying a foreign language in college, but I think a student also needs to think realistically about what kind of job they would get with a degree upon graduation.
Not every thing worth doing pays well.