stalker

I am fully proficient in English and Russian. I've studied some French but am obviously not at all good at it (got 500 in the French SAT) and wouldn't mind brushing up on it, or/and learning Chinese from scratch (due to the fact it will probably become the world's second or maybe even premier language as its 1.3bn population converges to Western development levels). That's the background.

However my parents strongly advise against taking language courses at Berkeley and just fulfil the Language Requirement by taking the Russian proficiency test. Their argument is that a) languages will take up too much time, more than their "nominal" value of 5 units, especially if starting from zero as in Chinese and b) the impression that Chinese is a hard language to learn and will lower my GPA. They advise that if I really want to go through with it that I do it separately from the whole UC credit system.

What I think. On b), it's true that Chinese is greatly different from Indo-European languages and have all these exotic (to us) concepts of different tones and lots of hieroglyphs to be memorized. On the other hand if its hard for everyone, then perhaps the marking will be more lax? In other words, what's the curve like for Chinese 1A?

a) is the real bugger I'm concerned about. Just how much work will Chinese 1A involve? What kind of proficiency are we expected to show after a semester of it? How much work per week does a novice have to devote to it?, and is it substantially more than for other "hard" courses like Econ 1?

Finally, if I do decide to go through with it, would it be better to do the intensive program during summer school so as to not have it clash with my other courses during fall/spring and either make me fail them or to lose my (social) life?

Any other thoughts/suggestions/ideas/tips would be appreciated and thanks in advance.

kenf1234

The problem isn't that characters are exotic. The problem is that there are A LOT of them, and you are expected to learn a tremendous number of them. That takes a lot of practice.

I took intensive Chinese at Berkeley during the summer relatively recently. The grading is not harsh, in that it's very straightforward what will be on the tests. You are expected to learn all the characters/grammar in a chapter, and then you are tested on that directly. If you learn everything, you can get an A. But learning everything is difficult, because learning characters is very difficult/time consuming, and you also need to learn tones, which is quite difficult.

In my intensive class, almost everyone came in with some background. Either they were chinese-american and spoke (or wrote) some chinese (or some dialect of chinese) already, or had studied japanese, or chinese in high school, or something. Practically every single person who started the class, and who didn't have some extensive background coming in, dropped it within a few weeks. The ones who didn't have backgrounds, and didn't drop, weren't getting high grades, as far as I could tell, they seemed to be struggling mightily. I had already taken Japanese, so I knew most of the characters already, so it wasn't overwhelming for me. But it still required a lot of studying to do well.

If you are diligent, and generally good at learning languages, and willing to put in the time with your flash cards, you can get an A in Chinese 1A. But it is A LOT of work. Also, even if you finish 1A/1B you will have very limited chinese proficiency. maybe enough to order at a restaurant or ask for directions, not much else. You would need a lot more study to read a newspaper or have a serous conversation, etc.

stalker

Thanks, that's very useful. Disappointing but kind of what I suspected.

Guess I'll leave learning their language until they start taking over the world. Or on a more serious note via the immersion-for-a-year-or-two route, should the chance present itself.

rofflez

I heard that non Chinese majors can't take Chinese any more due to budget cuts - is that true?

kenf1234

^^You couldn't become a Chinese major unless you could take Chinese 1A, so that couldn't be the case. My understanding is that they were talking about limiting East Asian languages to L&S students. Anyway, we'll see how things actually shake out.

Beatchick

I'm really glad you asked this question, because it's a language I've always thought would be fun (but really hard!) to learn. I guess I'll just get a book on the characters and maybe do it at a language school after I graduate!

88888888

Yea, I think they are limiting east asian languages to only L&S students. I asked them if i could take it, but they said i probably wouldn't get a spot cause im in CoC.

tcmzueck

I would recommend not taking Chinese in college. It's too difficult and time consuming. You have to be really serious about learning the language to have any kind of success. Take a couple semesters and you'll forget it all quite quickly. Witness Chinese people living in the U.S. Even they start to forget all the characters and get sloppy! Do a semester abroad if you're serious about it.

kenf1234

^^Though I agree about doing a semester abroad, I think it's better to study a basic course, at least, before you go. You'll learn a lot more if you hit the ground with some study under your belt.