<p>Here is my situation:
Vietnamese, 16, Male, Junior from TX
Just took the SAT in March, 800 Math/620 Critical Reading/610 Writing
Plan on retaking it.</p>
<p>I do not know Vietnamese, but I can get around with my French. I'm a beginner in Spanish and Italian. And next year I'm taking German and Latin, along with teaching myself Italian. I love studying languages and traveling, being able to express oneself in multiple ways is awesome. And I like the idea of being able to talk and have people not understand what you are saying. I like studying the history of languages, like as why French is not as "Romantic" as the other Romance languages, why English is more like French than German, etc. I also like studying word roots and being able to dissect languages. I never liked reading, however. I consider myself a pretty good writer, even though my SAT scores don't really show how good I consider myself with writing.</p>
<p>On the other hand, I've always excelled at math, and I love the fact that math an international language. One of the reasons I love baseball so much is because of how it is the most numbers-oriented sport out there. My dream job would be working for a Major League Baseball club, analyzing statistics and whatnot. But I don't think that would be too likely.</p>
<p>So I'm stuck between deciding on linguistics or mathematics: something I've been interested just for a couple years as opposed to something I've excelled at for my entire life. Any advice?</p>
<p>How about a major in statistics and a minor in linguistics? Or double major if you think you’re up for it. Think about your career goals first and make that your focus, then minor/double major in the other out of interest.
Oh, and I think golf is the most numbers-oriented sport. Scoring, yardage, holes, hell, even the clubs are numbered.</p>
<p>I think you may have the wrong idea about linguistics. Please correct me if I am wrong.
I too love learning languages and am very interested in many languages, but loving languages is by no means a reason to assume that one will enjoy studying linguistics. Linguistics is a very deep and technical field, very much scientific in its approach. </p>
<p>While the history of language/s is a topic of interest amongst some linguists, it’s not the thing that undergrad linguistics really ever focuses on. I kinda think that you have this idea that since you like languages and want to learn a lot of them, linguistics would be your thing. Really though, that’s not how it works. I would seriously recommend you read (NO, i command you read it if you havent)</p>
<p>The Language Instinct, by Steven Pinker</p>
<p>If you enjoy the book, then I’de say go ahead with studying linguistics. If you don’t then I would strongly advise you not to study linguistics because he basically covers the gist of many branches of linguistics and linguistics as a whole. It’s a pretty easy read too, except a few of the parts on grammar (which can be a little complicated to grasp at first), a few hundred pages, and it’s very reader friendly (it’s witty and informative–nothing like a textbook).</p>
<p>I find the largest misconception of linguistics is somebody thinks “oh, it’s the study of languages. Sweet, that means I can learn languages and study the grammar and/or etymology of Xlanguage”, when that’s really not the case.</p>
<p>Hi strosfan, as a math major I encourages you to find more information about what math majors study so that you can have an idea what it is like to be a math major. It is very far more different from the calculus you learned in high school. All of the core courses are proof-based. Have you ever read proof-based problems in mathematics? If not, you should try to pick up a basic proof-based math book, then see if you like the materials. Do you ever wonder why 1+1=2? Are you curious what the symbol infinity really is? Are you surprised if I tell you that the set of all natural numbers: {0,1,2,3…} has the same number of elements as the set of all odd numbers: {1,3,5,7,…}? An ordinary person who doesn’t study math would think that the first set contains more elements than the second set, but that is not true. There are a lot of interesting things you can learn in math. Here I just gave you a few examples.
By the way, I’m Vietnamese too. Personally, I’m kinda sad to hear that you don’t know your own mother tongue while knowing French, Italian, Spanish, and next year you’ll take German and Latin. I think it’s really worth to learn Vietnamese if it’s your mother language.</p>
Scoring, yardage, holes, hell, even the clubs are numbered.</p>