I know I have asked lots of foreign language questions in the past....

[Hunter's Moon]

I just can't get this foreign language thing figured out.

 

I have taken Italian I and II and was on track to take III and IV for Junior and Senior year. I just can't imagine doing this language any longer. It is a beautiful language, it really is. It just isn't for me.

 

I have no interest in it. I know that I will either a) put it off constantly and have to rush to complete a years work of work or b) not do it at all.

 

I know, I know, I should just do the responsible thing and do it. Suck it up and go on but I wanna cry just thinking about it.

 

I have textbook/self teach book but I have no other resources for Italian. I found many free online courses in other languages.

 

My problem with letting it go is the college requirements. Looking at the colleges I mainly want and plan to get into, they would like to see 4 but only require 2. I know I should follow their recommended courses but not if I have to drag myself to do it every day.

 

Any experience going to college with 2 years of 2 separate languages?

 

I know many people will tell me to suck it up and just get on with it, but if I have to learn something, I would like to enjoy learning it. I understand I can't enjoy everything but...

[Guest Cheryl in SoCal]

What about doing a different language for the remaining 2 year? Way back in the dark ages when I went to school I took 2 years of Spanish and 1 year of Latin.

[Hunter's Moon]

That is what I want to do but I worry that colleges will look down on it.

 

I plan on taking American Sign Language no matter what other foreign language I take. I am not using that as my foreign language.

 

So whether I choose Spanish, French, Greek, or stay with Italian, I will be studying ASL as well.

 

I thought I should throw that out there.

[Sunshine State Sue]

How do you feel about completing Italian III and calling it a day? Is there any place you could take it and not have to self-study?

[jld]

I understand you have dreams, but maybe you need to just be honest with yourself about what is realistic for you, in your particular situation. Maybe you could trust that your dream colleges will understand and accept you despite any foreign language lack on your part, or, if they will not, that it just wasn't meant to be, and you can find a college that you would still be happy at, even if it isn't your dream school.*

 

You've taken on a lot, Stephanie; there aren't many kids here who homeschool themselves completely. My dd is pretty independent, but she still has a former Spanish teacher for a mom and an engineer for a dad, which means she has resources to draw on in the foreign language and math and science areas, areas that can be pretty tough to negotiate on your own.

 

Do you have a co-op nearby that you could join, to have the help of other homeschooled kids or parents?

 

*I wonder sometimes if we put too much emphasis on dream schools, and overlook smaller or closer or just less expensive colleges where plenty of people are still very happy, are able to study what interests them, and later on manage to find work in their fields.

[Jan in SC]

If you have a couple of colleges that you really like, why not call them and ask their opinion?

[Teachin'Mine]

I have seen that some schools require either three years of one language, or two years of two languages, so it may be fine. I agree to check with the colleges. You will have a pretty strong application in the language department either way a you plan on doing sign language as well. If it's really making you totally miserable, then changing course might be best. :) If you decide that you want to just do the third year to get it over with, maybe taking a class at a community college would work better. One semester counts for a year of high school, so you'd be done sooner.

Edited August 11, 2010 by Teachin'Mine

[memphispeg]

You could ask yourself if it is Italian that is bugging you or ADVANCED language study that is doing you in. Maybe you could keep studying and find someone to "speak" Italian with periodically. Sort of a mini-home-foreign-language-immersion program. Orrrrr.....maybe a "pen-pal" or Facebook friend you could communicate with, in Italian only.

[Hunter's Moon]

Thank you everyone for your responses. I have a lot to think about and both my parents are supportive either way.

 

I will definitely be giving the schools a call.

 

I don't have many resources for languages at all. Colleges around here won't take students until the summer before their Senior Year because that is when they offer a free course. I am not sure if they offer classes that can be paid for but either way that would be out of my reach.

 

Thank you everyone for the suggestions and reassurances.

[Hunter's Moon]

You could ask yourself if it is Italian that is bugging you or ADVANCED language study that is doing you in. Maybe you could keep studying and find someone to "speak" Italian with periodically. Sort of a mini-home-foreign-language-immersion program. Orrrrr.....maybe a "pen-pal" or Facebook friend you could communicate with, in Italian only.

 

It could be the advanced part. Maybe, I don't know. The fact that I am almost a year behind in language study because of both my Italian teachers might be it also. I would have to do a lot of catch up and I just have no one to talk Italian with me. I have tried those language chat rooms but everyone speaks different dialects. I don't want a dialect, I would like the language that is taught in schools. The kind of 'universal Italian language'. Same thing with speaking with someone Italian. I'm sure I could find a restaurant or something but they speak dialects also.

[jplain]

Yes, be honest with yourself about whether it is the language or the advanced study.

 

It was a little of both for me. After completing Spanish III, I switched to French during high school. I continued French in college only to complete my foreign language requirement. Later I took Japanese as an elective. But in all cases, I skipped out before I got to the tough stuff.

 

Now I regret it. I wish I'd challenged myself to delve deeper into a second language. I really did prefer the way French sounds, and I very much enjoyed learning it. But I can't lie: I also enjoyed how much easier it was than Spanish IV would have been. Language hopping protected my GPA, but it didn't challenge me.

 

Now as an adult I've given myself the task of learning Spanish to basic fluency, using a variety of resources. I'll eventually seek out online tutoring from a native speaker.

 

Regarding college admissions: I doubt it hurt me, but that was a long time ago. If you were my child, I'd encourage you to stick with Italian, and I'd help you seek out resources that would make the learning more enjoyable.

 

Is there a community college nearby that offers Italian? My youngest sister, who was homeschooled, took Italian at a community college and loved it. She really enjoyed the social aspect of learning language in a group setting.

[emubird]

My daughter got into college just fine with 3 high school years of Spanish, 2 college semesters of ASL, and 1 college semester of French. The ASL will fulfill all her college language requirements.

 

My guess is that she would have been fine with just the 3 years of Spanish. She was strong in other areas, so they were willing to overlook her not having a lot more language. I suspect she would have been fine with 2 semesters of Spanish. (And if you're really strong in other areas, you might even get away with no language at all, although that's not your situation. Colleges overlook things when they see students they want. The only real problem might be at a state university where they tend to do things by the book. But do they want more than 2 years? They didn't when I was in high school.)

 

FWIW, the ASL she took moved fairly slow, and this was at a school that prides itself on having an ASL interpreter degree, so it's not like they were some podunk school that happened to offer a year of ASL. They were using Signing Naturally and only got through about a fourth of the second book by the end of the 3rd semester (my daughter took another semester of ASL after she was admitted to college). So if you do enough ASL that you could understand the videos from that course only partway into the 2nd book, you might count that as 3 years of high school ASL without fudging. You might have only spent 2 clock years on it, but maybe you'd be more advanced than expected and could call it an intensive course.

 

You should definitely count the ASL as a language. Even if the college you apply to doesn't count it as fulfilling the graduation requirement, they will most likely count it as a high school language.

 

Did you check with your library to see what resources they have for Italian? If they have Pimsleur in this language, you might find that a good thing to try. I've found that when I just can't go on with a language, somehow I can with Pimsleur. It just seems like an easy way to pick up a language. The big problem with Pimsleur is that there's no reading or writing, but you do have that book you got.

 

If your library doesn't have it, try interlibrary loan, if they have such a thing. Put it on your ipod if you have one.

 

Or try this yahoo group:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Italian/

I haven't joined, so I don't know if most of their postings are spam, but it might be useful, if only for finding a penpal.

 

I know, you said you were sick of Italian, but you might change your mind.

[EKS]

This is only my opinion, but I believe that colleges use foreign language study as a proxy for the ability to stick with something that is cumulative and not overly inspiring over many years (just as medical schools use o-chem as a proxy for the ability to memorize). I know you are a conscientious and serious student, and I think that will be reflected more in a third year (and preferably a fourth) of the same language rather than the first two years of another language (especially if that language is a Romance language).

[Mabelen]

It could be the advanced part. Maybe, I don't know. The fact that I am almost a year behind in language study because of both my Italian teachers might be it also. I would have to do a lot of catch up and I just have no one to talk Italian with me. I have tried those language chat rooms but everyone speaks different dialects. I don't want a dialect, I would like the language that is taught in schools. The kind of 'universal Italian language'. Same thing with speaking with someone Italian. I'm sure I could find a restaurant or something but they speak dialects also.

 

Have you tried Busuu.com? Pretty much all the Italians I've met my generation (40s) and younger speak standard Italian, because that is what is taught at school throughout the country, not just their local dialect. I would expect Italian Americans perhaps to only know their family local dialect but not born and bread Italians living in Italy... What chat rooms have you tried?

[Twigs]

Have you thought about saving Italian until the summer and doing an intensive study - only study Italian, several hours a day. You can google "intensive foreign languge" for more details. I had a friend who did.not.want to spend any time in foreign language do this in college. She was able to fulfill her requirements quickly, which suited her.

 

Best wishes whaterver you decide.

[Brenda in MA]

Are there any older folks in your area, at perhaps a senior center, who would be willing to meet with you each week to chat in Italian and help you out? Maybe you'd luck out and find a former teacher.

 

You might have to deal with learning an Italian dialect, but I think it would look best on your transcript if you could at least get through that 3rd year. My area has a fairly large elderly Italian immigrant population, and I bet yours does too.

 

Best wishes,

Brenda

[Ester Maria]

You could ask yourself if it is Italian that is bugging you or ADVANCED language study that is doing you in.

This.

 

Italian is the most beautiful language in the world with amazing art heritage and inspiring culture bla bla... until people approach subjunctives. And subjunctives of pluperfect. And then all of that in passive. And then figure out that the Italian morphosyntax is pretty much a Latin one, save the nominal inflections. And then those syntactic rules, and the whole "formal" layer of the language that most people would not use in an everyday setting anyway. That's when most learners give up - in ANY language. Intermediate is, by far, the WORST stage of learning a language, since you're stuck in the middle - you cannot properly use the language yet for all you want (be it oral communication or reading or listening to authentic material broadcasted at a quick native speed) before you learn all of the aforementioned things, but you're also not a complete beginner in order for it to be exciting, funny, new and easy, with visible quick progress. Any accumulative area gets tough in the middle of the road, and even something as naturally possessing a unique beauty as Italian gets boring and tiresome at that stage amongst learners.

 

Now, what separates those that make it up to Dante from those that don't is actually pure, mechanical determination, not to say work ethics and a bit of forcing yourself to go through something. This is the stage in which you aren't supposed to "think" too much, let alone indulge yourself with fancies of giving up and moving onto another language (in which you'll face the same problem when you get in the middle of that road... and then you'll join the army of lingusitic jacks of all trades and masters of none, who've dabbled into many roads and made it through none ;)) - the stage of "suck it up, do it, move onto the next subject". Even if it feels like nothing is being learned. Various little bits ARE getting accumulated, the building IS being built, but you cannot see it, and you're getting lost in it, since you don't know what it will be like: you're learning something new, of course that you don't know yet. The golden rule of the this longest stage and the most tiring one is "don't let yourself go".

 

I gave up on German (the only language I was allowed to give up on, since the others were parts of a fixed framework and nobody cared if you wanted to study them or no), ALWAYS remained hanging somewhere in the air, like a futile effort - I knew too much to give up so easily, I just had to suck it up a few more years, and with some effort, I would got very far in it too. It was one of my biggest educational regrets and even though I can de facto read it (as in, go through a text with REALLY interests me, and even then not as smoothly), it's not it. And with just LITTLE persistance and effort - because looking back, what seemed huge back then was, in the context of my overall education and life, a rather small time investment which would pay off - I could have had one more language on an academic level. And in the recent years, I regret it more and more because I've discovered a huge amount of scholarship and publicistics of interest accessible in German that's not being translated to other languages that I speak, or not so quickly as I'd need it. I wanted to kick myself for not having learned German properly when I could have more than once in my life.

 

And ironically, same thing with modern Greek, which I took up later, even finished grammatically, but then stopped because of some other academic fit of the moment. And even though I can, again, use it passively and all, a LOT of times I wish that I knew EITHER German EITHER Greek - but PROPERLY. To know either of them, but to know it WELL, would be a MUCH better situation that to "kinda know" both, but really know none of the two.

 

However, when you speak a couple of languages fluently, you can "afford" yourself a couple of such loose languages without advanced literacy with no problem, since you don't really lose anything. But in your situation, you're losing a LOT - since instead of focusing the effort in one area that will be learned properly and pay off, you're spreading that effort over few areas that won't actually be learned. It's a lot funnier approach, but few decades from now, you won't know anything if you continue that way, switching back and forward, without fully learning any language.

 

It's totally irrelevant whether the focus is Italian or French or Russian - ideally, it's a "big" and "useful" language to start with - but you should stick with it until you've reached a comfortable level even in periods of lesser motivation. That kind of patience and silent persistence is often needed, no matter what you deal with in your academic life.

 

When I started university, they told us of this "emotional curve" of studying, I don't know if there's any official name for it, but I found the concept quite interesting: you start with enthusiasm and excitement... about second year you hit despair, total lack of interest, wondering "is this for me or I should have listened to my parents and study law?", even failure... then the third year, you go through it only because you want to get it done with and finish, you have a love-hate relationship with what you study, up and down periods... about the fourth year, you become cynical about all of that realizing that you'll never learn it all anyway and become a proper expert, but you still keep going... so you finish the fifth, sixth, however long is the course, ONLY because of persistence, with mixed feelings you start to work... And then quite soon the love and excitement come back, you realize that that's totally it, and you feel like kissing feet to all those people who MADE you go on when you felt like giving up. :)

 

It's not true for 100% of the cases, but for the majority, the process of studying is something like that indeed - and the hardest part is in the middle, when it feels like you're learning nothing and all of that is worth nothing. I heard once somebody compare language learning to flying - you know how you feel that nothing is happening exactly when the plane is the fastest? Similar thing with being in the middle in studies.

 

That there are cases in which one should give up because one has made a mistake and is totally miserable doing what they're doing - I agree. Such mistakes can be made, especially while picking a university career. But for most of the people, lack of success can be tracked to lack of persistence more than anything else. It's quite tough to continue once the initial motivation and excitement are no longer there - but more often than not, it's worth it.

 

If I were your future college, I'd want to see 4 years AT LEAST (preferrably, it would have been started before high school and then just continued there) of the SAME foreign language. The reason why such requirements don't exist in Europe is that by default people come with full high school study of a few languages, that they usually started back in middle school, not to say elementary - and it's usually the same languages all the years. Languages are treated like any other obligatory subject, there IS NO giving up on a subject, and even if you get an initial say on WHICH language you want to learn (you often get it for the second or the third language), you're required to stick with it till the end. I'm quite surprised the American universities do not require much, and I'm glad to see that that's starting to change.

 

So my opinion with regards to your situation is pretty much to stick with what you've got. You've made a decision two yearsd ago, now go with it till the end. You're not majoring in it that you could profit from questioning the choice this much; it's just a high school subject that requires few hours a week. The less you make it an issue, the less of an issue it will be.

That's what I say to my daughter, who's a bit like you :), when it comes to picking a language: your can choose from the options, but what you choose, you'll have to stick with it till the end and attain a reasonable level in it. Any else language learning whims can be dealt with in her free time, but it's very important that she has an accumulated 5-year study in one modern language besides English, or else all those snippets of various languages she'll have studied won't be of any actual use and won't add up to anything significant.

[Mabelen]

Are there any older folks in your area, at perhaps a senior center, who would be willing to meet with you each week to chat in Italian and help you out? Maybe you'd luck out and find a former teacher.

 

You might have to deal with learning an Italian dialect, but I think it would look best on your transcript if you could at least get through that 3rd year. My area has a fairly large elderly Italian immigrant population, and I bet yours does too.

 

Best wishes,

Brenda

 

I would disagree with this unless these elderly Italians really speak standard Italian. There is a huge array of Italian dialects; some are very different from standard Italian and won't be of any use outside of their particular area. Nowadays you can find Italians living in Italy who speak standard Italian at your fingertips through Internet and a web cam if you are really interested!

[Mabelen]

This.

 

Italian is the most beautiful language in the world with amazing art heritage and inspiring culture bla bla... until people approach subjunctives. And subjunctives of pluperfect. And then all of that in passive. And then figure out that the Italian morphosyntax is pretty much a Latin one, save the nominal inflections. And then those syntactic rules, and the whole "formal" layer of the language that most people would not use in an everyday setting anyway. That's when most learners give up - in ANY language. Intermediate is, by far, the WORST stage of learning a language, since you're stuck in the middle - you cannot properly use the language yet for all you want (be it oral communication or reading or listening to authentic material broadcasted at a quick native speed) before you learn all of the aforementioned things, but you're also not a complete beginner in order for it to be exciting, funny, new and easy, with visible quick progress. Any accumulative area gets tough in the middle of the road, and even something as naturally possessing a unique beauty as Italian gets boring and tiresome at that stage amongst learners.

 

Now, what separates those that make it up to Dante from those that don't is actually pure, mechanical determination, not to say work ethics and a bit of forcing yourself to go through something. This is the stage in which you aren't supposed to "think" too much, let alone indulge yourself with fancies of giving up and moving onto another language (in which you'll face the same problem when you get in the middle of that road... and then you'll join the army of lingusitic jacks of all trades and masters of none, who've dabbled into many roads and made it through none ;)) - the stage of "suck it up, do it, move onto the next subject". Even if it feels like nothing is being learned. Various little bits ARE getting accumulated, the building IS being built, but you cannot see it, and you're getting lost in it, since you don't know what it will be like: you're learning something new, of course that you don't know yet. The golden rule of the this longest stage and the most tiring one is "don't let yourself go".

 

I gave up on German (the only language I was allowed to give up on, since the others were parts of a fixed framework and nobody cared if you wanted to study them or no), ALWAYS remained hanging somewhere in the air, like a futile effort - I knew too much to give up so easily, I just had to suck it up a few more years, and with some effort, I would got very far in it too. It was one of my biggest educational regrets and even though I can de facto read it (as in, go through a text with REALLY interests me, and even then not as smoothly), it's not it. And with just LITTLE persistance and effort - because looking back, what seemed huge back then was, in the context of my overall education and life, a rather small time investment which would pay off - I could have had one more language on an academic level. And in the recent years, I regret it more and more because I've discovered a huge amount of scholarship and publicistics of interest accessible in German that's not being translated to other languages that I speak, or not so quickly as I'd need it. I wanted to kick myself for not having learned German properly when I could have more than once in my life.

 

And ironically, same thing with modern Greek, which I took up later, even finished grammatically, but then stopped because of some other academic fit of the moment. And even though I can, again, use it passively and all, a LOT of times I wish that I knew EITHER German EITHER Greek - but PROPERLY. To know either of them, but to know it WELL, would be a MUCH better situation that to "kinda know" both, but really know none of the two.

 

However, when you speak a couple of languages fluently, you can "afford" yourself a couple of such loose languages without advanced literacy with no problem, since you don't really lose anything. But in your situation, you're losing a LOT - since instead of focusing the effort in one area that will be learned properly and pay off, you're spreading that effort over few areas that won't actually be learned. It's a lot funnier approach, but few decades from now, you won't know anything if you continue that way, switching back and forward, without fully learning any language.

 

It's totally irrelevant whether the focus is Italian or French or Russian - ideally, it's a "big" and "useful" language to start with - but you should stick with it until you've reached a comfortable level even in periods of lesser motivation. That kind of patience and silent persistence is often needed, no matter what you deal with in your academic life.

 

When I started university, they told us of this "emotional curve" of studying, I don't know if there's any official name for it, but I found the concept quite interesting: you start with enthusiasm and excitement... about second year you hit despair, total lack of interest, wondering "is this for me or I should have listened to my parents and study law?", even failure... then the third year, you go through it only because you want to get it done with and finish, you have a love-hate relationship with what you study, up and down periods... about the fourth year, you become cynical about all of that realizing that you'll never learn it all anyway and become a proper expert, but you still keep going... so you finish the fifth, sixth, however long is the course, ONLY because of persistence, with mixed feelings you start to work... And then quite soon the love and excitement come back, you realize that that's totally it, and you feel like kissing feet to all those people who MADE you go on when you felt like giving up. :)

 

It's not true for 100% of the cases, but for the majority, the process of studying is something like that indeed - and the hardest part is in the middle, when it feels like you're learning nothing and all of that is worth nothing. I heard once somebody compare language learning to flying - you know how you feel that nothing is happening exactly when the plane is the fastest? Similar thing with being in the middle in studies.

 

That there are cases in which one should give up because one has made a mistake and is totally miserable doing what they're doing - I agree. Such mistakes can be made, especially while picking a university career. But for most of the people, lack of success can be tracked to lack of persistence more than anything else. It's quite tough to continue once the initial motivation and excitement are no longer there - but more often than not, it's worth it.

 

If I were your future college, I'd want to see 4 years AT LEAST (preferrably, it would have been started before high school and then just continued there) of the SAME foreign language. The reason why such requirements don't exist in Europe is that by default people come with full high school study of a few languages, that they usually started back in middle school, not to say elementary - and it's usually the same languages all the years. Languages are treated like any other obligatory subject, there IS NO giving up on a subject, and even if you get an initial say on WHICH language you want to learn (you often get it for the second or the third language), you're required to stick with it till the end. I'm quite surprised the American universities do not require much, and I'm glad to see that that's starting to change.

 

So my opinion with regards to your situation is pretty much to stick with what you've got. You've made a decision two yearsd ago, now go with it till the end. You're not majoring in it that you could profit from questioning the choice this much; it's just a high school subject that requires few hours a week. The less you make it an issue, the less of an issue it will be.

That's what I say to my daughter, who's a bit like you :), when it comes to picking a language: your can choose from the options, but what you choose, you'll have to stick with it till the end and attain a reasonable level in it. Any else language learning whims can be dealt with in her free time, but it's very important that she has an accumulated 5-year study in one modern language besides English, or else all those snippets of various languages she'll have studied won't be of any actual use and won't add up to anything significant.

 

:iagree:

[Hunter's Moon]

Thank you everyone.

 

Also, thank you Ester Maria. Reading your posts, I always decide to just keep chugging along. I really should just go back and read your answers to my questions from now on and get the inspiration from that :)

 

Thanks again