Hi folks. I'm now about two years away from my jaunt to grad school (I couldn't bring myself to leave until the 9th graders I came in with graduated. They're juniors now). I've been getting ready to take the GRE and looking at programs that I'm interested in. I do have one thing that has been somewhat scaring me though. I know that most grad programs in English require at least one foreign language. My foreign language in high school and college was Japanese. Not only does that not qualify for most of the programs I've looked at, but my last Japanese class was nearly a decade ago and I remember nothing. I know there are some English PhD's on here. What can/should I be doing to address the foreign language concern? Thanks!
1. I'd go to the chronicle of higher education fora at chronicle.com. Go to the Grad School forum. You'll get good advice. 2. Only 1 language? Most programs that I looked into when i was looking at English (before choosing Spanish) required 2. The things you need to consider w/ a language and grad school are the following: A. access to primary sources in that language (writers and artists) and how that will affect your academic trajectory. Everybody and their brother does French and German, which are fine and all that. But I really see the field pushing more and more towards the former colonies as we continue in this whole Post-Colonial inquiry. So the languages that are hot right now are all très subaltern: Spanish Arabic Hindi/Urdu Think along those lines. Pick a language that has legs and will continue to be extremely relevant in a globalized world. Bear in mind that another thing you want to do is build your cv. The less-studied languages are easy to get scholarships in order to study. A colleague of mine came in as theee weakest candidate in her class, but took a Catalan course for a semester. Applied for a summer grant. Got it. Applied for a federal grant (FLAS) the next summer. Got it. Next thing you know, she's getting fellowship after fellowship after fellowship, each one more prestigious than the next. Her ENTIRE PLAN was solely to build up her cv. Me? I applied for the same grants and tried to study French. Hah!! I should've done Haitian Kreole. But the language need to fit your interest. If you're interested in Muslims in England, even remotely so, Arabic might be a good thing to study. And believe me, you'll be traveling every damn summer for free for as long as you want. If you're interested in the Indian diaspora, Hindi. However, it seems to me that the Indians have ... how shall I put this... "control" over anything and everything related to India. If you're interested at all in Latin America, SPANISH. In fact, I'd say Spanish is your best bet, but I readily admit my bias. If you're interested in Spain's linguistic periphery (Catalunya, Galicia, the Basque Country) and/or the linguistico-cultural periphery of Europe in general, take Spanish and from there one of the minority languages. Lots o' scholarships available to study continental Portuguese, but the real attraction of Portuguese is Brazil. B. access to secondary sources and theory in another language. Frankly, it helps to be able to read French when all the profs, grad students and undergrads have checked out every goddamn copy of Kristeva in the entire metro area, but the library has a couple of things of hers in French. Voila.
I forgot to mention other things: You should probably try and decide which language you'll do quickly. Like I said, I think Spanish is a good bet, especially if you could get your current school to fund a language course abroad this coming summer. You *could* justify it as preparing to serve the Latino populace at your school, for instance. OR... iirc ... you work at a predominantly black school... You could study in an Afro-centric place like Puerto Rico or the Dominican Republic. Frame your grant request in the context of "diaspora issues" and the growing internationalization of African Americans now that something like 30% have origins in the Caribbean and Latin America. Even if your district/school won't fund a trip abroad at all, you can find great schools in inexpensive places to study the language of your choice. Take a semester of Spanish this spring in a night course at a community college (NOT an adult school), go to Guatemala or Mexico or Costa Rica this summer, come back and place into 2nd year Spanish. W/in little time, you will have fulfilled the requirement and at very little expense ($1500 for 5-6 weeks including room and board!!). Trust me. It's worth it. You don't want to be taking a basic language course at a major university 5 days a week when you could be studying for your seminars.
UCLACarlos's advice is really good. I'd just like to add something more, um, instrumental. The languages people claim they speak on their grad school apps may have little or no bearing on reality. I've even met plenty of grad students who want to study France or Latin America and don't have as strong a command of the relevant languages as they probably should. As for the programs themselves, many do have language requirements but they are little more than formalities--especially if you're working primarily on English stuff. Are you looking to do substantial research on foreign language texts? If so, start learning languages right now. If you're just looking to fulfill a program requirement or maybe beef up your application a tiny bit, then just maybe take a Language X for beginners class. Quite frankly, this is much less of a make-or-break component on a grad school app than, say, the GRE.
Jacen, a lot will depend on the school and their quals. My program required either two languages at merely translation level, or one language at near-fluency level. If you just have to pass a translation test or two, don't bother worrying about it. You can just jump through that hoop when you get to it. (After prelims, coursework, and comps, IIR) The university will probably offer a course specifically for grad students to learn how to use a dictionary to translate a text. The prof will give the test a number of times throughout the semester, and people can just keep taking it over and over until they pass. When they pass, they're done with the test and their department gets notified that the language requirement has been met. I did this for both Spanish and German (having never spoken a word of German before). I'd had some Spanish in h.s. and undergrad, but had forgotten it all. The near-fluency option would of course be the more mature and serious route to take. For that, maybe consider an immersive study abroad program over one of your grad summers.
Re: translation exams Careful on the translation exams, though. Most dept. are really cool, but you can get a complete a-hole or the requirement could be fierce. The Italian Dept. at UC Berkeley is/was famous for being utter dicks about their exams. They were straight up royally prejudiced against Spanish speakers. It got to the point where the Spanish Dept had to go to the Dean and work out an agreement (exams to be corrected by a linguist in the dept. whose 2nd language was Italian and had published extensively on Italian linguistics) b/c none of the students were passing the exam. What instigated it was one of my friends was a published playwright in Italian and "failed" the exam, challenged it and miraculously was told that there had been an error. These are the things that you can find out from the graduate counselor (he/she will steer you away from the "problem" languages) and from students already there. I seriously lucked out w/ my Italian exam b/c the proctor got called out for an emergency meeting and they put a student worker in charge. When the hour was up... I sure as hell didn't say anything and the student worker innocently let me go until the following hour. The best way is to finish the required classes beforehand so that you're not scrambling at all. Get started this spring.
Nothing to add except my own experience: I passed two foreign language exams as a part of my Ph.D. work, French and Spanish. I had two years of college French. One year of Spanish... in 9th grade. I prepared for both the same way: I found poets that I liked and translated their poems into English. That basically got me really good at using the bilingual dictionary. That was the only real skill I needed. I'd do it every other day for an hour or two over the summer and up to the exam in the fall. The actual exam consisted of spending three hours translating into English a portion of a scholarly article. Basically, since by that time in my academic career I knew what scholarly articles sounded like, I made sure my translation reflected that knowledge, and not my actual command of the original language. Places with really stringent requirements should make sure that translation courses are available to students who need them. Check with the programs you're looking into. When you visit programs, this is one of the questions you can ask grad students... although most of the people who've had to take them (doctoral candidates) are the ones who tend not to be around very much. They're otherwise occupied.