Taking Lang in Applied Lang Centre

snickerpuss

Hey, was vaguely considering taking french or italian course in the applied language centre but i don't know exactly what it'll be like, wondering basically if anyones taken one of the languages there?
Theres oral, aural and written exams so i don't wanna take it and then mess up.
Any ideas?

rainbow kirby

I did Japanese, and I'd recommend it to anyone. I'm going back for the level 2 course this year.
I absolutely loved the course. It was a small group, 7 in my class. It was on in the evenings, Wednesday 6-8... so a long day there. There's a big emphasis on oral communication in the beginners-level classes and they can be fun. The exam comes after 16 weeks of classes, they're not that hard. The oral for Japanese was only about 2-3 minutes long and very easy to prepare for. The aural was really easy too. The written paper was quite short, only a small amount of writing, quite a few short texts to read and answer questions on. So nothing too hectic.
Go for it! It's well worth it.

jacket

They don't encourage 1st years to take a language.

Red Alert

I was thinking of taking up french again this year. Didn't cos one of our lecturers said he "personally didn't encourage it" when asked by a few people. I'm sorry I took any notice of him now.

Clive

snickerpuss wrote:

Hey, was vaguely considering taking french or italian course in the applied language centre but i don't know exactly what it'll be like, wondering basically if anyones taken one of the languages there?
Theres oral, aural and written exams so i don't wanna take it and then mess up.
Any ideas?

Well I assume since you´re only thinking about it, that it´s not a requirement of your course. I had to do Advanced French for Engineers many moons ago and it was quite easy. Japanese is generally considered the easiest course though.

The ALC has very limited resources and there are certain courses that have to do a language module, so of course they have to try to discourage people who just want to do a course for the laugh (most of whom drop out after a few weeks anyway).

If you´re really serious go up and talk to them about it. Fiona Healy is probably the best person to talk to if you don´t get any joy with whoever else is looking after you.

blondie83

Did the advanced French myself in first year as it was compulsary to do a lang back then. The in third year I did Japanese purely out of interest. I'd definitely recommend the Japanese to anyone, its pretty much the easiest as Clive said. Also our teacher was very interested in teaching it and teaching the culture to us as well

snickerpuss

Yeah i'll go to the introductory thing they have that tells you about the course, its not compulsory on my course but i was thinking about italian because i thought it might tie in kinda nicely with art history cos there are so many italian terms and plus i've always wanted to learn it.
Thanks all!

jacket wrote:

They don't encourage 1st years to take a language.

I'm going into second year so its cool.