My Son Chose to take 3 languages this semester

<p>My son is a freshman and just finished selecting his classes for next semester. When I spoke to him last night, he said he is going to take french III, chinese I, and italian I. Geez, that seems like too many to me. What can kid major in with all these languages?</p>

<p>Linguistics?</p>

<p>Actually my first boyfriend in college majored in chemistry but took languages for all of his electives. As I recall he’d taken Russian, Spanish, Greek, Hebrew and German. A couple of years of each.</p>

<p>Focus on the here and now. Languages are extremely time consuming; they ordinarily require more class time than other courses, and one cannot slack off until the end of the semester when papers are due and finals are scheduled. Each is more like one course and a half. Plus, he may get totally confused about the grammar and syntax of the various languages he will be learning.
Tell him don’t do it unless he wants to commit academic suicide.</p>

<p>Taking all three at once sounds pretty tough. If he has never taken any Chinese before, it is hard to predict how hard Chinese I will be for him. It is normally a very difficult class. Has he talked to people who have taken Chinese I at his college to see how much time it usually takes for students at his school?</p>

<p>I think that he will not have trouble with Italian I; he obviously likes languages, and he speaks French, which I think will help him with the vocab. On the other hand, this is the one I’d suggest he take later if he were going to drop one of them.</p>

<p>University of Delaware has a really neat “Three Languages” major.</p>

<p>I agree completely with marite. Studying three foreign languages at once is a recipe for an academic train wreck, and probably reduces the chances of learning any of them well. (When I was 12, for about four months I was actually studying four foreign languages at once: Latin and Spanish in school, Hebrew in Hebrew School, and Russian on my own. But I dropped the Russian, and slacked off a lot on the Hebrew. Needless to say, I didn’t learn much Russian or Hebrew.)</p>

<p>I am also a little ambivalent about college language courses, especially in mainstream languages. While college is a great place to learn a language, languages are one of the few things you can really learn well outside a higher-education setting, and you certainly don’t need a PhD to teach you French I. So I’m not certain taking multiple languages is a good use of the very scarce resources represented by your college electives.</p>

<p>He can major in anything and even go to Graduate school or Medical school if he wants later. My D. has taken only one - Spanish, but alltogether she knows 4 (including English), not fluently, but she would be able to communicate. She is pre-med (Zoology major) with Music and Neoroscience minors. She is not even interested in languages.</p>

<p>He is so excited about his classes that I don’t want to dissuade him. He is good at languages, but he is sooo much better at math/science. It just comes to him naturally. He says he doesn’t enjoy math/science anymore. How involved does a parent get in a kids class selection? I am in the hands off camp…I think.</p>

<p>?? I took three languages in hs; two in college. The college foreign language courses weren’t any tougher/more time consuming than my other classes. And isn’t OP’s son’s course selection his decision? I assume his academic advisor signed off on his schedule.</p>

<p>chinablue, does your son have an academic advisor at college? Someone who can help him plan for a major, etc.? Who (one hopes) has to sign off on his course selections?</p>

<p>Please encourage your son to talk to his advisor. I can’t say that an advisor will definitely put the kibosh on this, but I can’t imagine that an advisor won’t throw a lot of cold water in your son’s face and get him to think hard about it, including thinking about it in the context of choosing a major soon afterwards.</p>

<p>Chinese at D1’s school is very time consuming with a lot of homework. Even Chinese having it as a spoken language at home struggle with it sometimes. She ended up taking Spanish to fulfill the language requirement. She didn’t think it was hard, but was a lot of work even compared to math.</p>

<p>I would assume that language would take more work than math, which is probably one of the least time consuming classes. D’s Spanish was easy for her. She took third year based on her placements test, she never had AP in HS. However, Spanish is easy language. Spanish was not anywhere close to amount of work in her science classes, simply not comparable. Science is what she is very interested (mostly Bio, Psych and Chemistry, with Bio being the most challenging and time consuming).</p>

<p>I second mathmom’s suggestion that he look into studying linguistics. Many aspects of it are math/science-oriented – areas of interest range all the way from formal logic to signal processing. There’s also a sub-specialty called computational linguistics that might interest him. All linguistics majors study several languages from different language groups. It sounds as though your son would fit right in.</p>

<p>I offer a contrarian view: I don’t think that a motivated student will have a problem with French III, Chinese and Italian. At college level French III he will be advanced enough not to have too many problems confusing it with Italian, knowing French will in fact make studying Italian easier. Chinese is a whole different ball of wax - demanding, yes, but not impossible to an enthusiastic and hard working student. </p>

<p>As to a possible major - son can do just about anything! Linguistics is a possibility (though don’t forget that linguisitcs is a different field from languages per se) but languages will be a terrific addition to literature (comparative literature) history, political science and, yes, math & science. Languages will open many doors – and let’s not forget that China is a huge emerging market for jobs for those with language skills. </p>

<p>Be glad your son has a passion, OP. It’s an absolutely vital component to success of any kind.</p>

<p>People who have a “gift” for languages have no trouble juggling them. I also took French, German, Italian and Spanish. After enough immersion in a language you begin to think in that language–especially if you are in a situation where using English is not acceptable. </p>

<p>My D’s roommate is currently taking Chinese, Japanese and Spanish. She is interested in Int’l Relations.</p>

<p>I think it’s important for students to follow their passions and experiment. Some people might think it unwise to take 3 Lit classes or 3 Philosophy classes or 3 Lab Sciences, but there are many students who do just that. </p>

<p>OP, Taking 3 language classes may either cement your son’s interest in pursuing them or it may be that the experience completely convinces him to try something else next time. Since he is a first year, I wouldn’t worry too much at this point.</p>

<p>I would think if you are certain you want to pursue an academic major and career in some sort of linguistics, foreign relations or foreign literature then it is not excessive. Especially if you have that passion. And like others have said, you can go to pretty much any grad school with a degree in language as long as you take the required prerequisites for the grad school program as well. My colleague’s wife majored in Spanish, and then went to Boalt Hall at Berkeley for law school.</p>

<p>However, if you just want to learn the languages for fun, and to be able to communicate, read and understand them, I believe there are faster and more efficient ways to learn them, or at least as fast and efficient. The main thing is to keep it up and use the language. I took a lot of Spanish in school, but mainly learned it by communicating with native Spanish speakers, including my Peruvian wife. We speak only Spanish at home, because I like it and I want my kids to know it. I also took a couple years of French in college, but never used it and only remember a few words. I studied Italian and Russian on my own for a while, using tapes and books and frankly didn’t see much difference in the speed and quality of my learning from the classes I took in school. I didn’t keep that up either, so I forgot most of it.</p>

<p>French and Italian are actually quite similar. It shouldn’t be particularly tough to study those two languages together. Chinese on the other hand is completely unrelated to any European language; it has a sharply different vocabulary and grammar (in fact, the whole structure of the language is different from that of an Indo-European language). On top of that, your son will have to learn the Chinese writing system, which is extremely difficult and takes several years to master.</p>

<p>Yes, he is definitely overdoing it unless he’s going to major in language, comparative literature, or the like. He should sample other subjects.</p>

<p>Once he truly masters French, then send him to Italy for 6 months for a true immersion and he’ll be speaking it semi-fluently – no need to “waste” college credits, at least in his first year, to learn it. As Bruno notes, if you know one of the major Romance languages well it’s fairly easy to pick up another.</p>

<p>But I’m sympathetic to his getting into Chinese early in college, while advancing his mastery of French.</p>

<p>It sounds cool to me, as if he really has an interest and is following it out. What does his adviser think? French and Italian complement each other and Chinese would be difficult under any circumstances, but if he’s interested in business, Chinese is the language of the future.</p>

<p>If it’s too much, he could always drop later.</p>

<p>From my personal experience, studying multiple languages sometimes causes temporary mental blocks. I learned Spanish in high school. In college I started learning Russian from my first year, then started German my second year. Problems sometimes occurred when I switched my studying rapidly from Russian to German – my mind wouldn’t work! I would THINK of Spanish! I would confuse German and Russian (two very different languages, with relatively few common cognates, but both highly inflected). </p>

<p>I know it seems strange, but it happened to me. The “foreign language center” of my brain seemed to have a kind of primacy principle: my first foreign language dominated.</p>

<p>Even today, though I didn’t study Spanish after high school I have perhaps a greater affinity with that language than with Russian (which I studied to a high level and have used extensively during my career,) or German (which I only completed about 1.5 years of, but do have some sympathy with).</p>

<p>In the case of the OP’s son, I really think he should pursue his interests in both French and Chinese (Mandarin?), but let his other mental faculties go to work, too, especially in early college years.</p>