Sizen Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4317 days ago 165 posts - 347 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Catalan, Spanish, Japanese, Ukrainian, German
| Message 1 of 3 21 June 2013 at 7:55am | IP Logged |
Lately I've been searching for schools that offer degrees or programs in multiple languages. So far I have
found a good many schools in Canada and the UK that offer BAs in Combined Languages or Modern
languages, where you are required to learn a minimum of 2 languages up to an advanced level, but most of
these schools have kind of disappointed me. One of the main reasons for my disappointment is that the
majority of these schools only have advanced courses in 2-4 languages, and they are almost always French,
German, Italian or Spanish. I'm not against these languages, but they're not really the languages I wolud
want to study in a univeristy.
Another aspect that somewhat disappoints me is that the classes don't seem all that intensive in many of the
schools (not all of them, however). Most of it seems to be the same old university-style language classes.
You know, an hour of grammar followed by extremely repetitive exercises and only 2-3 opportunities to write
or speak throughout the year.
I'm looking for something more along the lines of the classes I took for Japanese last year: 3 hours every day;
first half was grammar, vocabulary, Kanji, and other core aspects of the language; second half was specific
classes for writing, speaking, business, Keigo, etc. All of the second half classes involved studying a new
element of that area of the language and then preparing a presentation or a short essay in 30 minutes that
was to be presented or reviewed during the next class. We were also given a good 30 minutes to 1 hour of
homework each day, usually sentence building exercises with the words and grammar we studied that day or
additional reading around specialized vocabulary. This was a language school, however, and I don't expect
exactly the same out of a university. I'd like to have something a little more than a short lecture, though.
So basically, what I'd like to ask today is: are there any schools (doesn't have to be a university) that offer
somewhat intensive courses from beginner to advanced levels in multiple languages, other than the 4
mentioned above, and that have schedules that permit taking 2 or more languages in the same
semester/year?
Best case scenario would be that it is in a big city and offers at least one of the following: Chinese languages
(Cantonese/Mandarin), Korean, Japanese, Russian, North Germanic languages (Swedish, Icelandic),
Hebrew.
The reason I ask is because I will start my post-secondary studies in one or two years, and I would like to
study math, linguistics or combined languages. I have found good schools for the first two options, but not the
third, which has prevented me from making a decision.
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Fasulye Heptaglot Winner TAC 2012 Moderator Germany fasulyespolyglotblog Joined 5825 days ago 5460 posts - 6006 votes 1 sounds Speaks: German*, DutchC1, EnglishB2, French, Italian, Spanish, Esperanto Studies: Latin, Danish, Norwegian, Turkish Personal Language Map
| Message 2 of 3 21 June 2013 at 7:00pm | IP Logged |
Perhaps you should make clear in your post that you look for recommendations of colleges / universities with foreign language classes and not private language schools, because this is an important difference. You are talking about "schools", but this may lead to misunderstandings.
Fasulye
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Sizen Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4317 days ago 165 posts - 347 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Catalan, Spanish, Japanese, Ukrainian, German
| Message 3 of 3 21 June 2013 at 10:05pm | IP Logged |
Sizen wrote:
So basically, what I'd like to ask today is: are there any schools (doesn't have to be a
university) |
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While a university would be good, I don't actually mind if it's not a university.
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