Choosing A Language
Unlike the rest of the School of Arts and Sciences, the International Relations (IR) Department at Tufts requires its graduates to “display advanced oral and written proficiency in a single foreign language” equivalent to eight semesters of instruction. This requirement often scares aspiring IR students away, though this requirement’s difficulty is over-exaggerated.
Before coming to Tufts, I already had varying experiences with multiple world languages. Having lived in Southern China until the age of 15, I could, and still can, speak Mandarin with a distinctive Northern accent, courtesy of my maternal grandparents who migrated to the South from the North in the 80s. I speak very basic Cantonese and was exposed to some Teochew as I frequently visited my dad’s relatives when I was little, however, I consider myself to be fluent in neither. Going to a Chinese public primary school meant that English was a mandatory course, in which I became quite conversational compared to my peers, but I was quickly “distracted” by Russian classes when I entered middle school. I was able to fully polish my English (and acquire an American, SoCal accent) in high school, during which I lived in a largely Hispanic region, received very basic Arabic lessons, and took one year of elementary French.
With all of that said, which language should I have chosen to study at Tufts? Having been exposed to a wide range of languages, this was no easy answer, but I had a “good” dilemma: I wasn’t choosing a language just to “fulfill a requirement”; I was choosing between varying opportunities that could take me to very different places. I talked to some Russian professors about continuing my middle school passion before I went to the French department to ask about resuming my high school language journey. Even though my Chinese placement test result validated my eight-semester proficiency in my native language, I was more than intrigued by the high-level Chinese seminars ranging from leading figures like Lu Xun to sci-fi writers like Liu Cixin. I also thought about starting a new language from scratch, like Japanese in which I can already understand some portions of its writing, but know nothing about agglutinative grammar, or Spanish in which I know quantifiably less than my American counterparts. And guess what? I didn’t even take a language class in my first semester, courtesy of my profound indecisiveness.
Deciding to take French in the second semester was somewhat of an arbitrary decision—I just chose one out of the many languages I was considering, and my one year of high school French allowed me to enter French II instead of French I, compensating for the “lost semester.” French was also a language that excites me—especially when I’m passionate about cuisine and history. This turned out to be one of the best decisions I’ve made. Learning any foreign language can be time consuming and intellectually demanding—that’s why college is one of the best opportunities to do it. I proceeded to spend the summer at the Tufts European Center in the French Alps, enrolling in two back-to-back Tufts programs while traveling the rest of the country in between (which I will talk about in the next blog post). In fact, I accelerated my French so much that I ended up declaring it as a minor. Of course, I thought about quitting when grammar and pronunciation lessons became a tediously recurring torture, but I have always managed to survive due in no small part to my amazing professors and stress-baking study group friends.