I need help deciding what language I should take in college. I’m currently an incoming freshman at Penn State University Park and I’m looking to major in something related to business. I am required to take 3 years of a language as an entrance to major requirement. I took Spanish 1 as a freshman in high school and I did horrendously, I received a C- which was my worst grade in my high school career. I then switched to Latin and I’m currently in my second year, but I am also beginning to struggle in that class as well. If the trend continues I will continue to struggle with learning languages as a currently am. I personally think Spanish would be the best language for me to learn, however given my past struggles I certainly don’t want to plummet my GPA. Any thoughts?
College language classes are generally more difficult than HS language. Spanish is considered one of the easier languages to learn. No real advice except be prepared to put in a lot of time. Maybe spend time this summer starting on whichever one you pick. Maybe try Duolingo, watch movies and listen to podcastsin the language, see if you can find someone to practice speaking with.
@intparent I’m doing the summer session up at PSU so I’m sure they would have resources available to me so I can try and get a head start. I’ve just been historically bad at languages and my main worry is my language classes may bring down my GPA.
GPA isn’t everything in life (as you will likely learn in more areas than foreign language when you get to college).
You can’t start a foreign language in the summer.
Even during the regular semester, it’s very intense: 4 class periods a week, 2 1/2 hours of homework for each class period.
What caused you trouble?
Recognizing similar words?
Word order?
Conjugation?
@MYOS1634 Comprehending sentences and the different tenses of words is what gives me the most trouble. I’m fine with translating individual words, but once you get into different tenses in longer sentences is when I get lost.
Are you good at English? Can you read and make sense of what you read?
You may do better with ideogram-based languages, but they’re also the most difficult.
You need to understand the relationship between each word, as well as parts of speech.
You should buy “English grammar for students of…” (Spanish, French…) It’s a very very useful book.
Just an aside - check to see if you can take the class Pass/Fail.
Can you take Latin 3 at PSU to satisfy the requirement? As long as you pass, you would be done. That may be better than struggling through 3 semesters. I had a friend that had a 4 semester requirement. His last semester mantra was D = done. Just make sure that you have other classes to offset your grade.
HS Latin 2 will place OP in College Latin 2 at best and may even place him into Latin 1 anyway.
But the problem is that Latin is of zero interest for business majors, they must take a “living”, modern language!
Trading partners involve Canada, Mexico, China, Germany, South Korea, and France.
So, based on this, French, Spanish, Chinese, German, Korean, and French would be useful languages.
If you have trouble with tenses, plurals, and building sentences but you can learn other alphabets/texts and don’t have trouble with non-Western pronunciations, I would suggest Mandarin. I’ve been told it looks great on your resume, and the sentence structure is almost identical to English. There are no tenses or plurals to worry about–in Mandarin you just have a verb and if it already happened there’s a suffix. You will have to learn a new writing system and the fact that it is tonal gives some people (like me) trouble, but if you really get excited about it, it’s a great language to know. Plus you’ll probably be exposed to recent Chinese history and culture, which is fascinating.
I would go with Latin or Spanish…but you will have to put much more time in.
I have an excellent aptitude for languages, but some people I know just struggle. When I was in college many moons ago I took Arabic for fun, really. But most people took it because it was so hard, that the teacher ended up giving As to the class. So maybe do something totally out of your zone, where the learning process is different, like Mandarin. You may find the instructors to be more forgiving.
Your C- in Spanish was four years ago. You have matured a lot since then, and you presumably have better study habits and less of that fear of looking stupid that typically plagues 9th graders. (Why the American education system starts language study at the height of puberty is beyond me!) Try to have confidence that you’ll do better this time with more effort and confidence. Once you’re past the early years, language acquisition is about hard work and not being afraid to sound like a fool.
Well, just to keep things confusing, I have to throw in German as a candidate if you want to be able to speak it. It is useful in business. No tonal dexterity required.
Thanks to Mark Twain, it has never recovered from a misplaced identity.
Olde english was a direct derivative of lowland German as spoken by the Saxon tribe. What this means is that modern English speakers do not have to teach their tongue new tricks to pronounce and to spell the words. The words are spoken as written and they do not break rules (they are German!). If your goal is help in business with the goal of speaking, start a conversation with a German instructor. You can actually say the words. Guttural sounds are not difficult as your tongue does not need to train to a new set of seemingly unnatural positions. After two world wars Germans were not boasting too loudly in the US although they were the largest minority in the US. They had to keep their voices down.
I still cannot spell in English. I was told this was the result of the Norman invasion as well as Latin and Greek scholars.
Ein Prosit! Rule: ie = e while ei = i, now pro-set, it is english with a clarifying rule that always applies.
Spanish or Chinese for business. You already started with Spanish and you can use one of the language programs to help you improve. My DS is a pretty good artist and writing in Chinese clicked for him because for the visual component.
Although English had Germanic roots, it collected vocabulary from French and other languages with varied spelling rules.