In search of words: Students study abroad

After her freshman year, as many of her classmates headed home for their first summer as college students, Sloan Pavsner '08 was gearing up for a very different experience: two months in China at Princeton-in-Beijing (PiB).

Studying Chinese was something of an accident for Pavsner. She had planned to take Greek but was convinced by her father that Chinese "would be far more practical," she said. She quickly "fell in love with the language, the culture and the history."

For a serious student of Chinese, studying abroad is a necessity. The structural differences between English and Chinese make classroom study a good beginning, but even though "the [University's] Chinese department is phenomenal," going to China is a must, Pavsner said.

"Chinese is the kind of language in which you need to be immersed in order to learn," she said. "You need to be completely surrounded by it. Your ear is just completely not tuned to the sounds –– so you need to go there."

Over the course of eight weeks, Pavsner completed the equivalent of two semesters of Chinese. Upon returning to Princeton, she enrolled in a 300-level Chinese course. She is now "getting close to fluency" and will once again travel to China this summer to work as a translator at a law firm.

Pavsner is not the only student to use the University's study abroad programs to accelerate her language studies.

As enrollment in non-European language courses continues to grow, an increasing number of students are studying abroad in Asia and Africa.

"The numbers in Arabic, Chinese, Swahili and Hebrew were on the rise last year and continued rising," Associate Dean of the College Nancy Kanach, who is also the study abroad director, said in an email. "Chinese continues to grow rapidly."

Kanach's office works with language departments to offer students a wide variety of opportunities for summer, semester and yearlong programs.

The Arabic program, which has grown dramatically since September 2001, will soon offer a new study abroad program in Egypt. Juniors in the Wilson School will be able to enroll in a task force in Cairo in the spring of 2008.

The University has also joined a consortium at the American University of Cairo that will give Princeton students studying in Egypt access to "special advising" and additional courses, Kanach said.

A summer abroad program in Kenya is planned for students of Swahili and will offer the equivalent of a second year of Swahili within a single summer.

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Given the immense popularity and success of the PiB program, Kanach and Chih-p'ing Chou, director of the University's Chinese language program, traveled to China last month "to identify strong semester programs in China that could attract students from a variety of majors," Kanach said.

Meanwhile, PiB continues to grow. After suffering a minor disruption in 2003, when the program was forced to relocate because of the SARS epidemic, the program enrolled 45 Princetonians in 2004 and grew to 57 students in 2005. PiB had 68 participants last summer.

The University has a partnership with Beijing Normal University, where foreign students live together in separate dormitories, but total immersion is maintained.

"They told us after the first day that [we] were not allowed to speak English. Even in our room, we spoke Chinese with our roommates," said Arjun Reddy '08, who participated in PiB last summer. "We had to sign a language pledge to only speak Chinese and promise not to break that," For him, "it was the major sticking point."

Another of Princeton's language immersion programs, Princeton in Ishikawa (PiI), offers a similar experience in Japan. Students live with host families, which constrains the program to about 40 participants, but "advanced students have typically attended other pre-approved language programs," Kanach said.

Despite its smaller size, PiI still offers the equivalent of two semesters of Japanese language courses. Living with a host family allows students to experience both complete linguistic and cultural immersion.

Raj Hathiramani '07 went to PiI last summer. "I really wanted a full cultural immersion program that would not only strengthen my language through intensive study, but also allow me to experience living with and being part of a traditional Japanese family."

Participants have three hours of class in the mornings, and "in the afternoons, we would be on our own to explore the town or participate in many of the program's extracurricular activities, such as traditional Japanese pottery, calligraphy and tea ceremony," Hathiramani explained.

He found the program so rewarding that he convinced his brother, a junior at Harvard, to apply. The following year, his brother persuaded his roommate to participate.

Hathiramani is so hooked on study abroad that he is completing the introductory Chinese sequence so he can go to PiB this summer — even though he is a senior.