My friend, Evan from work has a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Duke University. He will be marrying another Ph.D. Electrical Engineering student from Duke in a couple of months. She is hispanic and going through Duke on a fellowship she received through the Department of Defense. Her undergraduate degree is in Physics. Evan and I talked yesterday about educational choices for students entering their undergraduate education with an eye to going on to get a Ph.D. He made the very good point that, if you want to study humanities it matters a lot more where you get your undergraduate degree than if you study engineering or one of the hard sciences. If you want to get into Harvard to study sociology, psychology, education, or archeology, it is pretty hard if you get your Bachelors Degree from Southern Oregon Universtiy or Linfield. On the other hand, if you get an engineering or hard science degree with good grades from a school like Washington State, Oregon State, or North Carolina State, do well on the GRE, and have the added bonus of being hispanic, you can get into places like MIT, Stanford, and Princeton and even get good assistantships and/or fellowships.
While we were talking about that, I mentioned that Kelly was a big fan of Condoleeza Rice, who went to good schools at a young age, played Mozart with the Denver Symphony when she was 15 and accompanied Yo-Yo Ma in a concert at Constituion Hall, etc., etc. We looked here up on Wikipedia and found that she speaks Russian, German, French, and Spanish in addition to English. That got me to thinking about the kids language education.
They are going to finish their second year of Rosetta Stone Spanish next year. Both of them speak Spanish quite well at least partially because we speak it at home. When they finish with that second year, our plan is to start them on more intense grammar work from textbooks in addition to third year Rosetta Stone Spanish at a slower pace. The textbook work is partly to prepare them for the CLEP Spanish Exam, but also to provide them with a better working ability to read and write Spanish rather than to just speak and understand spoken Spanish. At the same time, I want to start both of the kids on a third language. We have assumed that should be French for a number of years now, but I am not sure that would be a good choice.
The kids speak a romance language and a germanic language. It very well might be better for them to get a language from a third language family. Lots of people suggest Mandarin. I think Russian would be a good option, too. Comments?
Hunter
Why not British or Canadian? 😉
I don’t want to make this language so difficult that the kids get discouraged. They have already had enough trouble learning North Carolinian.
Hunter
We don’t talk country compared to our cousins!
Well, that is a good thing. That lets them work there way into the language a little more gradually.
Anonymous
Hey Ken you mentioned once that if anyone wanted to use the Rosetta Stone for spanish to let you know? Well Todd is wanting to learn spanish and we are wondering what you had in mind? Did you see that Jim Hamilton’s mom died of a brain tumor? The funeral is tomorrow. One of the friends from Lebanon died, Gene McKinney and the funeral is Monday. Richard Itami fell and hit his head . He is in ICU and they aren’t sure how much damage right now 🙁 9 will be graduating from OSU and there is a potluck for them on Sunday. Course it is STILL raining here every day and is cold so I’m not sure how that will work. Logan graduated from high school on Wed much to Rhonda’s relief! I asked her to e-mail you guys. Love, JoAnn
Mongolian, because it isn’t available on Rosetta Stone yet.
Yeah, but then Vernon would know what we are talking about!
JoAnn, we had heard about Jim’s mom, but not Gene nor Richard. I think Jeannie W. currently has the Spanish program, but I am not sure. I will check into it, but you have to remember to bug me about it.
Hi,
Just wandered onto your website via a Rosetta Stone rabbit trail. I have a daughter who is wanting to take
Spanish. She is 15th on the waiting list for a 6 week Elementary Spanish class at out local community college,
but is not too thrilled with giving up 5 hours per day, 4 days per week, smack dab in the middle hours of each
day. She was wondering if she used Rosetta Stone for several hours each morning, if you believe that it could
be possible to finish Level 1 in 3 months? She has already taken 2 years of Russian from The Learnables program,
but has decided that Spanish would be of more use to her. She is a good student and is self-motivated.
Thank you, Ruthie
Hello Ruthie. Thanks for the note. I reply to this in an email.
Thank you for the gracious things said about our little family. Why don’t you come visit the new improved version? We will come see you when America is a little older…
As far as a language suggestion, I took a semester of Russian at MHCC in Gresham and loved it! It was so different than any other language I’ve studied (that being only English,Spanish, and Japanese) that it was almost like speaking in code. I found it very fun…for what that’s worth.
My minor was in German Technical Translation. German is a possibility, but I am not sure I would recommend it. Almost all the people I talked with (after I was already deep into it, of course) informed me that German was the most difficult language to learn. Someone asked a man who spoke eight European languages which was the most difficult (at the time he spoke eight), and he said German was by far the most difficult.
Also, as with German, there’s not much point in learning a language where every native speaker speaks your own language, as is hte case with German. Have you ever met anyone from Europe who doesn’t speak English?
Of course, it also depends on your purpose for learning the language … whatever that may be. My purpose in learning German was the ideal I had in my head of a “roving international engineer”. Well, after I graduated and went to work for a company as a customer service engineer to Austria, Germany, Luxembourg, etc., the romance soon wore off and I soon saw myself just traveling a lot and being away from my wife.
Man, I think I am convinced that we need to learn Russian. My cousin Udo struggled mightily with German and his mother is a a native speaker, born and raised in Germany. I have heard Russian is hard but doable. We will keep you posted.