philoglossia

dayzeeland--

your post really speaks to me. i'm also a prospective language major trying to find a program that can challenge an already-proficient speaker (or in my case reader as i study dead languages).

my advice to you would be to look up the gourman report or nrc (national research council) rankings for the graduate programs (not undergraduate) that are top in japanese.* you can also use the IPEDS database to find what institutions had the most majors in your language graduate the last year. (this is very time-consuming, but the c.c. user collegehelp has several recent threads with the data all in one place.)

some of the programs you find are going to be at huge state universities that instantly turn you off. don't discount these immediately--most of them have smaller honors colleges, and you can probably get a nice scholarship offer from them, especially with nm status. the others will probably be at schools you had heard of, but didn't know were outstanding in your field. look up the departments and faculty there, then do a little reading in the student newspaper. you will quickly get a sense of what it is like to do work in your field at that university.

* i say graduate programs because, as a previous poster pointed out, undergrad language programs in the us tend to be focused mostly on acquisition. you need a literature/culture type program, which will only be available where there's a grad department

dayzeeland

its sad that i cant do lit. and I thought that there would be plenty of kids in HYP calibre schools that had plenty of people fluent in more than one language. I might want to do Spanish language or learn something new.

galoisien

Next stop: theory of universal grammar, with Noam Chomsky?

swoop

yeah i know Mandarin, Hindi, Swahili, Arabic and Farsi (from rosetta stone) so i am kinda like you.. well not really.. but I know Hindi/Mandarin/English the best (I am going to be in Chinese 6 next year and my parents are North Indian) so I will probably learn Arabic in college..

as for admission.. in the words of the Kenyans, hakuna matata