<p>Hi, so I am a high school senior planning to attend Tufts next year as part of the class of 2013, and I want to eventually go to medical school. However, I also have a love for foreign languages, culture, and history, and was somewhat appalled to find that Tufts doesn't have a minor option in Spanish--in fact they only have the option for Italian, which is probably the least useful and universally-applicable of the 4 romance languages taught there. Am I just missing something here? For such a reputed institution for IR, I am also surprised to find the extremely limited amount of foreign languages they offer...</p>
<p>For the size of the school and the demand, there seems to be a reasonably wide variety of languages - Arabic, Chinese, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Latin, Russian, Spanish, French, Hebrew, Swahili, and I think a few more via the excollege.</p>
<p>Also, my understanding regarding the lack of language minors in the School of Arts and Sciences is that they’d be more or less meaningless; minors in most subjects consist of ~6 courses, and you already have to take 6 language or culture courses. I’m pretty sure Engineers have the opportunity to get language minors, though. That doesn’t stop you from double majoring, or even just taking more classes for the sake of learning the language. I feel like even regardless of the distribution requirements a language minor doesn’t mean too much; simply having fluency would be more useful.</p>
<p>It seems like the only reason Italian has a minor is to attract more students - as you say, it’s the least useful of the bunch.</p>
<p>And what languages are you looking for that Tufts doesn’t offer?</p>
<p>Well for one I would have liked perhaps a couple ancient languages, like Ancient Greek, Sanskrit, Middle Iranian, Akkadian, Egyptian, Biblical Aramaic, etc. More importantly however, in terms of modern languages, I was surprised and vainly disappointed to find that Tufts doesn’t have Korean, Hindi/Urdu, Persian, Czech, Portuguese, or Turkish. These are some MAJOR languages that are of increasing utility in the world of today and that other schools that I was deciding between, with similar “size and demand” like UChiacgo, Northwestern, and JHU, mostly had. </p>
<p>I think merely “studying Spanish” and graduating with a college degree in Spanish makes a big difference in the professional world. I mean I’m not just speaking on behalf of myself here, I think a school as well-reputed as Tufts with such respected IR and social science programs should have a much more varied and integrated foreign language curriculum. With my own personal SAT spanish score, I would have been able to place out of Spanish 1,2,3,4,and 21, and could have begun college immediately working towards my spanish minor in spanish 22 and beyond. That makes a big difference to me.</p>
<p>dang, you chose tufts over jhu, nw, and chicago?</p>
<p>I think they’re teaching Haitian Creole though the ex-college currently. Portuguese is currently taught through the Department of Romance Languages: it’s a brand new program and though right now it only has intro and intermediate courses, over the next few years it will be expanded to a full major. Hindi/Urdu used to be taught through the ex-college. It was discontinued due to lack of interest (meaning fewer than six students per semester were interested in learning it). I seriously doubt there’s enough interest in Akkadian, Biblical Aramaic, etc. to sustain courses. </p>
<p>Northwestern and JHU are twice the size of Tufts, and UChicago has several thousand more students as well. Larger universities will always have a larger breadth of available courses. That’s one of the trade-offs of choosing a smaller college. With fewer students, there is going to be less interest in rare languages. UChicago seems to be suffering from a lack of interest in its strangest languages as well: though Syrian and Biblical Aramaic are still on its registries, they don’t appear to offer actual courses in them. Those were just the two I checked; I would be quite surprised if Akkadian or Middle Iranian had enough interested students to offer courses every semester.</p>
<p>Northwestern has a more believable set of languages on offer, but it comes with certain trade-offs as well. They seem to prefer breadth of language instruction over depth. At Tufts, a student can actually major in, for example, Chinese or Japanese, but Northwestern doesn’t offer enough advanced instruction for this. Tufts students can minor in Arabic, but Northwestern students can only take introductory to intermediate coursework.</p>
<p>Looking at Johns Hopkins, it appears to be even weaker than Tufts in terms of ancient languages: we offer ancient Greek and Latin, and they offer neither. Even so, they have the edge on us, offering 15 languages to our 13 available, thanks to a strong showing in Asian languages. Hardly an overwhelming defeat, though.</p>
<p>I don’t have a good answer about why Spanish and French minors aren’t available. They’re actually the only two languages that offer majors and not minors (though as hebrewhammer points out, engineering students can get Spanish and French minors), Arabic, Chinese, Latin, Greek, Italian, Russian, German, Japanese, and Hebrew all offer minors. (Swahili and Haitian creole do not offer majors or minors, and I believe Portuguese will start offering a minor fairly soon.) I guess I would suggest looking into the [Latin</a> American Studies minor](<a href=“http://ase.tufts.edu/latinamericanstudies/LASminor.html]Latin”>http://ase.tufts.edu/latinamericanstudies/LASminor.html). It can be fulfilled almost entirely through taking Spanish classes, along with two Latin America-centric courses, either history, political science, music, art, anthropology. . . anything really.</p>
<p>
You chose Tufts over Duke, if memory serves. I chose Tufts over Cornell and Williams.</p>
<p>
Missed this the first time around. Tufts does offer Greek, and Latin as well, through the Classics department.</p>
<p>
No. Chicago puts an enormous amount of resources into its NELC department. Egyptian and Akkadian are offered every single semester, and usually Hittite and Sumerian are as well. That’s not even including the other courses that are occasionally offered – Elamite, Ugaritic, Hurrian, Luwian, and the like. No other university in the world comes close to matching Chicago in ancient language offerings (except perhaps UCLA).</p>
<p>
No. In addition to Greek and Latin, Hopkins has numerous courses in Egyptian, Akkadian, Sumerian, Hebrew, Ugaritic, and occasionally other Near Eastern languages.</p>
<p>Let’s be honest…Tufts is simply not an ancient language powerhouse, even in the Boston area (unlike Harvard and Brandeis). Tufts does offer Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Sanskrit, and Egyptian, though, which is enough for most students.</p>
<p>
While UChicago certainly offers an impressive array of languages, the [UChicago</a> language center site I checked](<a href=“http://languages.uchicago.edu/studies/courses.htm]UChicago”>http://languages.uchicago.edu/studies/courses.htm) didn’t list courses for Syrian and Biblical Aramaic, and I never claimed to have checked any other language. Now that I glance at it again, Hurrian appears not to offer active courses either (perhaps I didn’t notice it the first time because I had never even heard of Hurrian before). Certainly UChicago offers many more languages than Tufts (by a factor of four or five, it appears) and I wasn’t trying to claim otherwise - I was just drawing a parallel regarding the inability of a university to offer courses for which there is insufficient interest. Now I may be mistaken if the site is wrong, but I wasn’t going to spend all day on the issue so I just used the information UChicago provided.</p>
<p>
If that’s true, then Johns Hopkins hasn’t provided evidence of it on the internet, without which I am basically helpless. I was actually quite surprised that I couldn’t find a Greek or Latin program at JHU, which is why I used the weasel words “appears to be” rather than the more definitive “is”. I’d appreciate a link if you’ve got one, but I really couldn’t find traces of any ancient languages at all.</p>
<p>
I apologize if it seemed I was trying to defend Tufts’ reputation as an ancient language powerhouse. You might actually be giving us more credit than we deserve. Sanskrit and Egyptian are not offered regularly; in fact, I’ve never heard of them being offered at all, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they were sporadic Ex-College or Classics offerings. </p>
<p>If Tufts has a reputation for language at all (and I don’t think we cultivate one, really) its for the depth and quality of offerings in common modern languages. This makes sense considering what Tufts’ mission statement of inculcating global involvement and active citizenship: it wants its students to be relatively strong in relatively common languages, not well-rounded in a number of more obscure languages. I’ll be the first to declare that improvements could be made: bringing back Hindi/Urdu, starting programs in Korean, Farsi, Cantonese, Vietnamese and Turkish, expanding the Arabic and Swahili programs to include a major, and offering minors in Spanish and French would seem like decent starts. This would have a nice synergy with our well-developed international relations program.</p>
<p>Frankly, if it were up to me I don’t think I would allocate scarce university resources to beefing up our catalogue of ancient languages when our programs in classics, archeology, and history aren’t really strong or reputable enough to be greatly benefited by them. Students who value ancient languages probably aren’t going to be coming to Tufts in the first place: as you say, there are better choices even in the Boston area. I would spend the money playing to the university’s strengths, adding languages that add value to the sought-after Institute for Global Leadership, International Relations, Political Science, and Economics programs. I believe in exploiting comparative advantage, but of course, that’s just my opinion.</p>
<p>I guess that last sort of brings up a question for Bagrationi: if you plan on taking Spanish, why do you care whether ancient languages are offered or not?</p>
<p>Oh, I didn’t mean it as a slight against Tufts. Tufts actually has a highly regarded Classics program, and any beginning Greek or Latin student quickly learns the benefits of Tufts’ Perseus Project. ;)</p>
<p>
Here you go:</p>
<p>[Department</a> of Classics](<a href=“http://classics.jhu.edu/]Department”>http://classics.jhu.edu/)
[Department</a> of Near Eastern Studies](<a href=“http://neareast.jhu.edu/]Department”>http://neareast.jhu.edu/)</p>
<p>[url=<a href="Registrar - Homewood Schools (KSAS & WSE) | Office of the Registrar | Johns Hopkins University; Office | Fall 2009 Course Schedule<a href=“Classics%20and%20Near%20Eastern%20Studies”>/url</a></p>
<p>Ah, just searching for JHU or Johns Hopkins along with variations on the word language turned up the SAIS language program, which is all modern languages, while searching for specific languages turned up nothing relevant at all, strangely. You’d think the department homepages would have come up.</p>
<p>I am proficient in several languages and am particularly interested in ancient ones. I don’t know, I thought if I had any extra time I would try to take an ancient language or two. But that’s unlikely given the pre-med required course load, on top of graduation requirements.</p>
<p>If languages are particularly important to you, you should note the cross-registration consortium Tufts has in place with BU, BC, and Brandeis. Between the three of them, you can find Akkadian, Aramaic, biblical Hebrew, Hittite, Ugaritic, Classical Armenian, Old Irish, Sanskrit, modern Greek, Bulgarian, Polish, Hindi, Swedish, Turkish, Czech, Old Church Slavonic, Old Russian, Old Persian and Avestan.</p>
<p>Bagratoni, if you would already place out of so many Spanish classes, why not just double major instead? You’d only have to take 6ish more classes, which is the same for a minor, and it looks more impressive than a minor ever would, if you’re worried about the difference between studying something and getting a degree in it.</p>