<p>I’m a chem major and I really, really want to learn a new language. I’d like to learn Russian, as I want to work in central Asia (Mongolia, Siberia etc, not as far south as Afghanistan or Pakistan) someday and Russian is a really good language for getting around the region. </p>
<p>My university offers Russian classes, but it might become difficult to fit them into my schedule, as the chem major is very intensive here. </p>
<p>I am pretty good at learning languages, and I really enjoy it. I placed into a higher level Spanish course when I got here, and it was quick paced course (combined two levels into one), and it and the course I took the next semester were a breeze. I also have some background in Hebrew, so not just romance languages. However, I feel like my Spanish course didn’t give me adequate speaking practice and I don’t want to run into the same issue with Russian here.</p>
<p>I feel I could handle the workload, but are MOOCs good for learning languages in the first place? How would you practice speaking with a MOOC? How can it check your results on written work and make sure there are no grammar errors? </p>
<p>I think this question is just like how well do Rosetta Stone or similar programs work. It depends on your personal learning style, your acumen for languages, and how much effort you put into them.</p>
<p>If you want to learn Russian to work in central Asia, that means you mostly need to work on speaking and listening (as opposed to reading and writing, although you’ll need that too). I don’t think that a MOOC is going to offer you the opportunity to develop those skills. You won’t be in class to hear the teacher’s pronunciation; there will be no one to correct you when you mess up; there are no other students to practice speaking skills with. Basically a MOOC will probably help you some with writing and reading if you are diligent, but not speaking and certainly not the listening part.</p>
<p>Russian is a critical language, though, so a lot of language scholarships will help you. The [Critical</a> Language Scholarship](<a href=“http://www.clscholarship.org/languages/]Critical”>Languages List - Critical Language Scholarship Program) will fund a summer abroad taking an intensive language program in Russian; the caveat is that you have to be “intermediate” before you can get the scholarship (which I assume is probably one year of Russian under the belt). CLS says that their scholars usually get the equivalent of a year of study in just one summer. There is also the [Boren</a> Scholarships](<a href=“https://www.borenawards.org/boren_scholarship/preferences.html]Boren”>https://www.borenawards.org/boren_scholarship/preferences.html); normally they only fund academic year study, but they have a special initiative to fund summer study for STEM majors in recognition of the difficulty in taking time away from the schedule.</p>
<p>You might also consider learning another central Asian language, like Azerbaijani (which is covered by both programs at the beginner level) or Kyrgyz, Ukrainian, Tajik (covered by the Boren) or Uzbek or Kazakh. These are designated critical languages by the U.S. State Department, and so there are more scholarships that cover them. Russian is too, but usually you have to be at a higher level in Russian to get them because you can more easily take a Russian class than a Kyrgyz class in the U.S.</p>
<p>You might also consider a summer language session at Middlebury; they offer Russian!</p>
<p>Thank you so much for your detailed response and for linking me to the scholarship programs, I didn’t even consider some of those. I will definitely look into them. </p>
<p>I was considering summer Russian classes as well, but my uni doesn’t offer Russian in the summer. Unfortunately I don’t have the funds to go to Vermont in the summer so I don’t think I’ll be able to do it at Middlebury, but I will definitely see if there are other schools (Raleigh NC area) that offer it. I just found out NC State offers a beginning Russian class during their summer session, so I might take that with calc and see what happens! </p>