worried about languages

[absolutely-clueless]

Hey guys. New to the forums. I'm currently a 2nd year master's student studying American Pentecostalism. I'm seriously thinking about applying to a PhD program. The problem is that I'm not fluent in any language other than English. I've taken some college courses in Spanish and French, but I never attained fluency.

 

I talked to my program director last semester, and he suggested Spanish might be a good language to learn since Pentecostalism is exploding in South America. He also said that universities don't really care how you learn the language as long as you can read sources proficiently. Should I just try something like Rosetta Stone? Will it look bad on applications if I'm a master's student with no foreign language experience? 

[Sigaba]

Hey, A-C.

 

You might profit from tooling around on the History forum, located here. There are a number of threads that deal with language requirements and fulfilling them.

 

Broadly, a number of variables make answering your questions difficult. You ccould end up applying to a program that has one sensibility when it comes to fulfilling language requiremetns but have professors of interest who have hold their graduate students to a higher level and thus focus upon langauge proficiency when looking at applications.

 

IRT learning Spanish, I recommend that you go to the Spanish department at your current school and find someone who can help you develop options.

[IRToni]

Rosetta Stone won't help you in accessing Spanish source material though, since it's very heavily focused on speaking, basic everyday vocabulary etc. Traditional text books are often much better for this kind of thing, especially newspaper reading courses etc. many of these can be done in self-study.

[virmundi]

Hey guys. New to the forums. I'm currently a 2nd year master's student studying American Pentecostalism. I'm seriously thinking about applying to a PhD program. The problem is that I'm not fluent in any language other than English. I've taken some college courses in Spanish and French, but I never attained fluency.

 

I talked to my program director last semester, and he suggested Spanish might be a good language to learn since Pentecostalism is exploding in South America. He also said that universities don't really care how you learn the language as long as you can read sources proficiently. Should I just try something like Rosetta Stone? Will it look bad on applications if I'm a master's student with no foreign language experience? 

 

 

Hey guys. New to the forums. I'm currently a 2nd year master's student studying American Pentecostalism. I'm seriously thinking about applying to a PhD program. The problem is that I'm not fluent in any language other than English. I've taken some college courses in Spanish and French, but I never attained fluency.

 

I talked to my program director last semester, and he suggested Spanish might be a good language to learn since Pentecostalism is exploding in South America. He also said that universities don't really care how you learn the language as long as you can read sources proficiently. Should I just try something like Rosetta Stone? Will it look bad on applications if I'm a master's student with no foreign language experience? 

 

Hi there! If you want to be proficient in reading Spanish, you want this book: http://www.amazon.com/Spanish-Reading-A-Self-Instructional-Course/dp/0764103334

 

"Spanish for Reading" by Fabiola Franco and Karl C. Sandberg is the book's name. This book follows the same approach as Sandberg's earlier works "French for Reading" and "German for Reading". While the focus is exclusively on the ability to read, and thus of little help when speaking, you'll find that this is actually an advantage. The format of the book, the deliberateness of the exercises, and the excellent layout all mean that by the end of the first chapter, you will be reading a fairly sizeable excerpt from an actual, real, Spanish journal article. There is -- point blank -- no better option than Sandberg's "for Reading" series for either French or Spanish (German for Reading has been out of print for a long time, so it is debatable whether it is still quite as useful given the reformation of German spelling in recent decades, although its method is still vastly superior to Jannach).

 

You won't regret picking up this book, particularly since it is currently listed at only $10 and some change on Amazon. If you work hard and do a chapter/day, you'll be reading Spanish comfortably within a month -- comfortably enough to pass most Ph.D. programs' Spanish exams with a dictionary in hand (if you aren't allowed a dictionary, you'll obviously need to do a lot more work to memorize vocabulary et al. )...

 

Good luck!

 

Editing to note that I am in no way affiliated with Sandberg, other than that his approach to reading has saved me a lot of heartache and got me through two of my three Ph.D. program reading exams.

Edited September 18, 2013 by virmundi