Purdue doesn’t have a FL requirement in most colleges/majors, but College of Science has a language and culture requirement. That requirement can be met by taking culture courses vs an actual language.
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Thank you for all the replies. My question was partly for myself, but also for anyone else who is looking to decide their college future, and a little bit of a rant.
I am already working towards a B.A.S. in management at a community college. I knew it had a language requirement going in, just did not think the language portion would be this difficult. (I have made B’s and A’s in all my other classes.) So wondering if there would be an option to transfer to complete my degree. But I am already towards the end with just language and capstone left to do. So may be too late for me- we’ll see.
Again, part of this was be informative for anyone else of some things to consider when planning their learning path.
To answer your question, I took one class of Latin in high school many years ago. Not sure even why I took it, since I did not imagine college really being in my future. Growing up with a single mom I had practically no meaningful direction or mentoring in life. But that is neither here nor there.
But even if I remembered anything of that one Latin class, Latin isn’t an option much anymore, and according to administration I would have had to complete both years in high school for them to have applied as meeting foreign language requirements. So in essence, kind of a waste.
I found learning a second language very difficult, even when I was acing math and science classes. One thing that I found helped a lot was to use the second language outside of class. Watch TV shows and movies in whatever second language you are trying to learn. If you are trying to learn French there are also some instructional videos available for free on-line (for some reason that I do not understand the BBC has some). In my case I started watching hockey games in French. While these do not seem to be available where I live, there are some French movies and one very good French comedy show available on Netflix. I would expect that you could probably also find Spanish shows on TV and/or on-line. The same might be true in other languages.
Again, using the second language is important. You might want to get together for lunch or some other activity with other students from the class and try to just speak whatever language you are trying to learn throughout the entire lunch.
If you pick French to learn, there are also some resources in Canada which are surprisingly inexpensive (some are government subsidized). One daughter for example took a 5 week intensive course over the summer at a university in Canada where they first described the rules in English, then for 5 weeks everything was in French. In the morning they had French lessons (there were 7 different levels of instruction, ranging from straight beginner to nearly fluent). Then in the afternoon they have games, again in French. When they are playing “le soccer” for example if you yell “here” someone might correct you, but if you are open and yell “ici” then they might pass the ball to you. At one point they went for a one day trip to the “Parc provincial des rochers Hopewell”. This is in New Brunswick which is officially bilingual, so tours are offered in both languages (and of course they took a French tour). When she got home after five weeks she and I could have simple conversations entirely in French (“simple conversations” is my limit at this point).
One wild thought: You could check with whichever school you are at and see whether a short intensive course such as this (possibly taken abroad) would give you credit towards your degree. What my daughter took was actually counted as two “semester equivalent” courses on her university transcript (and since she was speaking French to some extent after the 5 weeks this might be appropriate). Credit for two classes might be all that you need. There are French courses available at some universities in the US, and in Canada, and in France. I would expect that there are Spanish courses available somewhere (perhaps locally, and in Spain, and I suppose probably South America). One advantage of being in a physical location where people speak whatever language you are trying to learn is that there are more opportunities to use your second language outside of class.
I think that there are probably a variety of ways to meet this requirement.
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