Learning the alphabet ... at Princeton

With early morning classes and daily homework assignments, introductory language classes are often considered burdensome by students who come to Princeton needing one semester of Spanish or a full course of study in French to fulfill the language requirement.

But for those who opt to tackle more exotic languages — ones with non-Latin characters and inflections that don't exist within an American range — the disorientation of learning a new language is often matched by the taxing nature of the classes themselves.

Most language classes meet at least three times a week for lessons and then several more times for "drills" — smaller, more intimate versions of the classes that emphasize speaking ability. Chinese and Japanese courses usually also have two or three quizzes each week.

Second-year Japanese student Henry Rounds '10 said though the quizzes seem "frequent," they "keep you on your toes and make final exams much easier."

Rounds said he thinks Japanese and other language classes seem difficult because of how much material they cover each week.

"Classes in high school introduced you to the language," he said, "but the rate of learning was ridiculous[ly slow], especially considering that as a rather a good student who has been taking Japanese for seven years, I still placed only into second-year Japanese here."

He added, "I'm learning as much here in one semester as I did in two to three years in high school, but it doesn't seem too fast at all."

Learning a new alphabet or character set can be overwhelming for students only familiar with the ABCs.

First-year Chinese student Ashley Alexander '09 said that in the first semester of Chinese at Princeton, students learn about 300 characters.

"It's difficult," she said. "You've got to learn not only the word, but also all the tones of the word, the pinyin for it — how one would write the word using English letters — and the character itself. It's a lot to keep track of."

But students said that the aesthetic pleasure of learning a completely new written script and the rewarding sensation of finally starting to "feel" the language can compensate for a language's initial difficulty.

"Even though learning Chinese characters has been and continues to be difficult, it's enjoyable to be able to write in it, if only for the purely aesthetic aspect," first-year Chinese student Katy Pinke '10 said in an email of the simplified characters she's learned to write since beginning to study elementary Chinese last fall.

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Learning a new language that looks and sounds nothing like English presents another challenge: grammar.

"In terms of the language system, Chinese sentence structure and word usage have turned my conception of grammar upside down," Pinke said. "It's very hard to grasp at first, but I am becoming more and more used to the rhythm of the language, and [I] am gaining more of an ear for what sounds right and what doesn't."

But Emily Forscher '10, now in JPN 302: Advanced Japanese, said her experience learning Japanese in high school was eased by the Hebrew she'd learned during elementary school. Despite being prepared by learning Hebrew, Forscher said "the idea that each symbol represented a whole word or idea was really foreign and hard to get used to."

To help students develop an ear for the languages they're learning or have learned, the University sponsors language tables in dining halls and eating clubs.

"I've been to the language tables a lot," Forscher said. "Each week the situation is different. When there are native and fluent speakers, I think the tables are really useful."

A regular at the Rockefeller College dining hall's Japanese dinner table, Rounds said the language tables are "incredibly useful, but it depends on whether you make the most of it and try to bridge the language gap and speak."

Rounds also said that his professor facilitates additional time for conversation outside class.

"At the end of each class, Professor [Keiko] Kuriyama passes around a sign-up sheet for 15 minute-long office hour sessions so we can come in and see her with questions, or just to chat," he said of his Japanese professor. "Because not everyone signs up, however, there's usually more than enough time."