<p>Oh, yeah, if you really want to do something please try it and don’t let me stop you! However, let me expound a little on my story…as I said, my friend is pretty advanced in French. She spent a year abroad in high school and took her classes there in French, and is planning to be a French major. Her french class was basically like any other class for her, so it really wasn’t the double that made it challenging. One, obviously, you go into a language like arabic with basically no background (assuming your native language is English or another Germanic or Romance language, of course). You’re starting from square one. Two, ALL beginning languages at Wellesley are intensive–meeting 4-5/wk, usually in the 8:30 am slot. Three, she did not care for her teacher. Now, there are two teachers for Arabic next semester, and different students click with teachers in different ways, so this fact alone should not scare you away. I do know that it took an incredible effort in time–not only class time, but the homework took absolutely forever and of course she was going to office hours. She estimated that the class took in the neighborhood of 26-30 hours/wk, all told–to put it into context, my more demanding and time consuming classes (including a 300-level math course) took around 13-15 hrs/wk if everything was added up. Of course different people could take wildly different amounts of time to do the same things, but it was definitely a huge commitment. As I said, she, as well as another girl who I am acquainted with, dropped the course at the semester. </p>
<p>So basically, here’s the deal: if you already have the language requirement for Wellesley fulfilled and are still really interested in Arabic when registration time rolls around, I would sign up and hope for the best. If you don’t have the language requirement fulfilled, you have some thinking to do, because if you drop Arabic at the semester like my two friends did, you will be forfeiting the credit. All it will count for is as a credit towards the 32 you need towards graduation–ie, you will be no closer to fulfilling the language requirement than you were at the beginning of the semester. Both of my friends had the language requirement fulfilled in another language already, so dropping arabic, while frustrating, had no particular consequences for them. This isn’t the case for you, but if you were JUST beginning your FIRST language and were thinking about choosing arabic, I would be very wary, because you would be pretty set-back by dropping it and the desire to do so may be strong.</p>