I am in 8th grade and am going to high school next year. I need to take a language and my Latin teacher told me he thought I could handle another language. I am interested in Latin, French, Chinese, Greek, and German. The high school I am going to does not offer German or Greek. I have been taking Latin since the 6th grade. I want to take Chinese, French, and Latin at once through my high school years.
Does anyone think it is a bad idea to take three languages at once? And if so, why?
I know that levels of difficulty are different for people but from what you have heard, can you list all five languages in order from hardest to easiest?
If any high school teachers are answering this, is it possible to take three languages without dropping academics or unified arts?
2007-02-20 13:54:09 · 3 answers · asked by Anonymous in Education & Reference ➔ Primary & Secondary Education
I think it all depends if you can handle learning three languages at one. I am learning Spanish, French and Italian and it's not that difficult because they are all related languages derived from Latin. Since you say you have been learning Latin for sometime now, I would suggest Latin first to get a good foundation, then french because it is a great language to learn trust me, then I'd say choose German, Greek then Chinese just because the characters of spelling are completely different from the other languages. My French teacher took Latin for a while and said it was easier because of her knowledge in French so that is a plus for you.
2007-02-20 15:58:57 · answer #1 · answered by Anonymous · 0⤊ 0⤋
I go to a really competitive school and taking 3 languages may be just as hard as taking 3 AP's. It may drive you insane. I have been taking Latin since 7th grade and i'm in 10th and i'm giong to continue taking it till i graduate out of high school. Chinese, for some it may be hard b/c there are so many different characters and its all based on memorization. for others it may be easy because you don't have to conjugate verbs or decline nouns. for chinese, i don't think there's much grammar involved, but i may be wrong. taking latin and french together wouldn't be hard- i have a friend who's doing that and she's fine. but, you may get confused a bit. as french is romance language which is a variation of latin, the languages overlap. french word for death is morte i think or mort, in latin it's mors, mortis. obviously there's a clear connection. but the accent marks may get to you, like where to put the accent marks in french and the macrons in latin. im not so sure about french, but in latin, there's no word order. so the verb could be in teh very beginning of hte sentence or in the end, so based on the endings, you ahve to decipher which part of hte sentence is in the nom, gen, dat, acc, abl cases. that's what makes real latin hard- going thru possible variations of translations and geting confused with grammar. the words sometimes may have no set meaning, so you have to choose whether this is the right definition of this word and on top of htat you have to get hte right case and form of hte word, which may be your greatest challenge yet. either way, pursue which ever language you are most comfortable with and strive for APS, they're great for college.
2007-02-22 12:58:49 · answer #2 · answered by param 4 · 0⤊ 0⤋
The biggest challenge would be adapting from class to class. when your learning new vocabulary you have to be sure which words belong to which language.
When I was taking Russian in highschool I'd sometimes slip into cyrillics when writing in my english classes. If your willing to put in the work envoloved I don't see why you couldn't pull it off.
2007-02-20 22:28:22 · answer #3 · answered by Rhuby 6 · 0⤊ 0⤋