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Will 2 years of Japanese count as a foreign language to get into colleges?

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  • 11-11-2016 12:39am
    #1
    lcatoliver
    Registered Users Posts: 6 ✭


    I'm in Transition Year and I am making my subject choices extremely soon and I am stuck. I DETEST French. I agree it's a nice and useful language but it's just not for me, I have absolutely no passion for it. I did it for the Junior Cert but I can not bear to do it again for the Leaving Cert, it will bring down my points drastically. My school give the option to take up Japanese in 5th year as a subject and I actually feel I would genuinely like it. It would also be a fresh start at a language and I would not make the same mistakes as I did when taking French. My question is, Which colleges/courses require some sort of modern language and would 2 years of Japanese and a Leaving Cert exam in it meet these requirements? I'm hoping to do something along the lines of Medicine/Science/Engineering (I'm still figuring my interests out) in colleges like Trinity, UCD, UCC etc.... For what I possibly want to do in college will I be able to do this by taking Japanese up in 5th Year and dropping French?


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    #2
    hasdanta
    Registered Users Posts: 244 ✭✭hasdanta


    In my opinion, stick with the devil you know. What you're doing in TY Japanese is way below the standard they expect in the LC. But yes, it would count as a foreign langauge


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    #3
    Canard
    Moderators, Education Moderators Posts: 8,572 Mod ✭✭✭✭Canard


    I'd say what you should do depends on your actual aptitude for French / languages in general. If you dislike French because you find it difficult, I would really question if Japanese will be any easier. That said, it (and Russian, incidentally) are shorter courses of only two years which, consequently, require a lower level in the language, especially at ordinary level.

    In any case, I'd suggest starting it but without dropping French entirely - did you do HL or OL for the JC? It might not be a bad idea to keep it as a safety net; even a C at JC HL could be a good foundation for an OD3.

    In relation to your other thread about German: I'm not sure if I'd advise you to do that. While the actual level of language taught in school even up to LC level is surprisingly low once you realise how much more there is to learn, the fact of the matter is that (in my opinion) if you had the ability to teach yourself that much German in one year, you'd be just as well not to. In any case, Spanish or Italian would be much better options for that as they're very similar to French, and a good few places offer Italian for beginners in 5th year to encourage people to study it. German is a great language, but it's not as similar to English as people make out, and without a teacher to explain the grammar concepts it could be tricky.


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