<p>Hola/ni hao( I think that's right)
I'm a rising freshman, and I recently found out I can take Chinese at my school. I didn't know this when I was registering for classes, so I signed up for Spanish 1.</p>
<p>Question is should I stick with what I've signed up or try to switch into Chinese 1? I don't know which class I want to take - I find perks for both. I was hoping that I could get some guidance as to which one is better. Whatever language I take is the one I'll stick with for the rest of high school and I'd try to become fluent in it as well.</p>
<p>Or, should I take both by taking one online and one in school? Problems I see with this are it might be a bit too much (I know freshman courses are easy, but I'm taking a difficult math course, a pretty work-intensive world history course, doing ultimate Frisbee which can take up a lot of time, model un or debate, possibly taking AP psych online, and on top of that I have friends). Also, I've heard from friends/ parents that they had trouble learning the language online because they didn't have anyone to talk to, but this could be resolved by practicing with friends who take one of the languages in class.</p>
<p>I would say that is depends on whether you have any prior experience in either of these languages. If you are a native Spanish speaker, say, don’t take spanish. Take the AP test independantly and take Mandarin at your school. </p>
<p>If you have no prior experience w/ either then just take whichever is more interesting/you think you can do well in. </p>
<p>I had experience in mandarin(not complete fluency) so I took mandarin.</p>
<p>I would definitely take Chinese, it is much more unique than Spanish. A vast majority of high school students take Spanish, while Chinese is rare. I will be a senior this fall and I have taken Chinese throughout high school. College admission counselors have told me that taking Chinese stands out on a college application because it more interesting and difficult than Spanish.</p>
<p>Personally, i’d take Chinese. It just sounds so much better than taking ‘plain old Spanish’.</p>
<p>/sigh</p>
<p>They tried to start a Mandarin program here, but all of my prickish classmates were like “DURR HERP STARTING A NEW LANGUAGE MAKES ME GPA LOOK BAD SO I DON’T WANT IT” and it never happened.</p>
<p>Spanish is a lot easier, this is mainly because of the writing. There are only a couple letters in Spanish that aren’t in English. But Chinese is a completely different writing system.</p>
<p>But not only is Mandarin more unique, it also has a lot of use if your future career will have anything to do with with international relations or business.</p>
<p>I suggest taking Spanish, especially since you mentioned that you would like to become fluent. Although Mandarin is a cool language to learn, I feel that Spanish will have more use. Especially if you travel a lot. Just a tip, Spanish is much easier! I’m going into Spanish 4 this coming school year!</p>
<p>Really, I haven’t had too much trouble with it. My teacher is pretty awesome though. The hardest part about Chinese is the tones. Chinese has four tones for words that I find hard to distinguish. Learning characters isn’t too hard, you learn what to look for in characters so it can be easy to remember characters.</p>
<p>It depends on you.
For me, I chose Chinese knowing that I have a lot of chinese friends who are usually fluent in Cantonese, can help me with Mandarin.
But Spanish is much easier, and you might find many opportunities to practice spanish rather than chinese.
I think it wouldn’t be a good idea to learn more than one language because you won’t be able to concentrate on one and you’ll get mixed up for sure. Plus, colleges are really looking for commitment in just one foreign language, so its not really beneficial to taking that extra course when you can have the opportunity to concentrating on your hard math course or AP’s</p>
<p>Spanish. The reasons why?
Generally speaking, there’s only so much you can learn in a high school language track. I don’t know if you realize this, but Chinese is probably the hardest language to learn for English speakers, in addition to Arabic and Japanese (so I’ve heard). If you truly want to get the MOST out of your high school education, clearly there is so much more you could take out of a Spanish course track than Chinese. Spanish is similar to English to a large extent, but most significantly, it shares the same alphabet, whereas Mandarin has… none? You realize that you will have to memorize characters in Chinese, which will draw away from your time to practice speaking. But chances are, you wouldn’t be able to practice speaking in Chinese much anyway because, well, unless you live near Chinatown, there aren’t many places you can practice. I hate to say it, but your Chinese friends will only want to practice with you just so much. Until you can actually speak a few sentences and converse intelligibly, they probably won’t have the patience. I’m just speaking from experience. One more reason why you should learn Spanish: Latin American countries are beginning to boom, especially Argentina. Much of South America is becoming more and more industrialized by the year, and if you think it’s important to know Spanish NOW, the need to be bilingual in the two languages will only become more important. Many schools across the US are starting dual immersion programs, starting in elementary school, so that students can become fluent in both languages. The fact is, America wasn’t ever really a country founded upon the English language; America’s proportion of English speaking people is constantly being lowered as our neighbors from the south continue to migrate.
If tl;dr, the gist of it all is that you will probably end up using Spanish so much more in your life than you would ever use Chinese. Unless you have some other reason to learn Chinese, such as you are of Chinese descent or plan on majoring in something like International Business, Spanish will serve you on more occasions throughout your lifetime and offer you opportunities almost daily to utilize it.</p>