Brooke01

Can answer my own earlier question since I've just heard from Columbia, and the news is good. Totally ecstatic. Good luck to everyone and congrats to everyone who's already been admitted.

Hi all, Just wondering did anyone hear from Columbia French (with or without the comp lit specialization)?

I'm not sure what sort of keyboards you normally use in the Netherlands, though I know most European countries have their own take on the keyboard. I took the GRE in Paris and you need to watch out for the fact that they will use standard English QWERTY keyboards. This is actually pretty unfair, since the Analytical section requires you to write very fast, but that's just how it is. Thankfully I realised this a few days before the exam and so had time to get back into the English keyboard (which in fact I'd learnt to type on, but I'd switched for a French AZERTY keyboard since I was writing mostly in French for a couple of years). Yet another way in which foreigners are penalised. Anyway if you practise a bit you'd be fine, and I think they do tolerate a few typos here and there.

For Comp Lit, usually they expect one language excluding your native language to a high degree of fluency, i.e. capacity to carry out advanced postgrad work in. In your case you native language is Chinese, and yes they do normally accept English as as your "foreign language" if it's not your native language. But most of the top programmes want, or at least strongly recommend, a second foreign language, at a somewhat lower, but still quite high, level, usually termed "reading knowledge". Reading knowledge means that you can read with relative ease in the language with the help of a dictionary (if you are looking up every second word however that isn't a proper reading knowledge!). So no it doesn't mean that you can read Don Quixote or Montaigne without any help from a dictionary; that level is fluency or near-fluency. And normally you'll need to learn a third foreign language (often has to be ancient or non-Indo-European) over the course of your postgrad studies (but not for admission). Hope that helps. Good luck!