ATAR Notes: Forum
National Education => General National Education Discussion => Topic started by: Joseph41 on February 07, 2019, 12:05:46 pm
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Just interested in what languages other than English the ATAR Notes Fam learnt through high school!
I've left off quite a lot of languages from the poll, so please select "Other" and then post what I'm missing if you studied a different language. :)
For me, I studied French and, to a lesser extent, Japanese. I dropped both of them earlier than I should have. How about the rest of you?
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I did Japanese in year 8, but learnt Mandarin outside of school. Dropped both of them at the end of the year, and now I really regret it lol
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I did Japanese in year 8, but learnt Mandarin outside of school. Dropped both of them at the end of the year, and now I really regret it lol
Why did you drop them at the time?
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I did French in high school, but have dabbled in other things outside. Spanish and Ancient Greek at uni. Mandarin, Cantonese and Serbian (all to varying degrees of success) in my own time :D
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I did French in high school, but have dabbled in other things outside. Spanish and Ancient Greek at uni. Mandarin, Cantonese and Serbian (all to varying degrees of success) in my own time :D
Which of these have you found most challenging?
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Did French from Year 7 to 10. It was fun learning them in Year 7 and 8 but got irritated by it in Year 9 and 10, hence my decision to drop it altogether at the end of Year 10.
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Did French from Year 7 to 10. It was fun learning them in Year 7 and 8 but got irritated by it in Year 9 and 10, hence my decision to drop it altogether at the end of Year 10.
Seems like a pretty common experience. Do you regret dropping it?
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Primary school did Japanese from grade 3-6
Then in high school did Japanese from years 7 - 10 but they started from scratch but was at a much faster rate of learning so didn't waste too much time.. In year 7-8 it was compulsory to do a LOTE but in 9-10 you had to choose them as electives.
I never really considered it for VCE although had some friends who did it with some success.
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I did French in Year 7 and Italian in Year 8. My biggest regret for the HSC as not studying a language but I think I had more than enough on my plate to handle. I chose Italian Beginners but it didn’t run in my school :'( I was already doing distance education for Music 2 so I didn’t want to have another subject piled on that. I’m hoping to take up Italian now in my free time to help with my AMEB course.
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Seems like a pretty common experience. Do you regret dropping it?
Sometimes I do regret it. The main reason why I dropped was because I was so petty that these French and Belgian girls in my class would always beat me in every assessment by one mark and they would top the year in first and second place and I came third. I was frustrated that my efforts were always outshined by these native speakers and my teacher would never acknowledge my efforts. For someone who doesn't come from a French speaking background, the fact that I was always one mark behind them in every assessment showed that I was good as a native speaker.
Though it is really a petty reason to drop a language so I wished that I continued it in Year 11 and 12 so that I could add another language to my list. However, I felt like doing a language in Year 11/12 would have been a huge time consumer with especially two major works that I was already doing.
I'm not really willing to pay money to learn French again and I can't exactly learn it at uni anyways so we (obviously) don't offer it.
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I did Italian during Year 8. It was fun that we got to go to a local Italian club, play bocce and eat authentic Italian food (since the club is run by elderly Italian people).
Does self-taught count as well? During high school, I would teach myself Korean and Japanese. While I'm not fluent in these languages, I can do basic introductions in Korean and order food in Korean.
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Why did you drop them at the time?
I dropped Japanese because it was an elective after year 8 and my interests were in other places. As for Mandarin, I really hated going to classes (they were done in my own time) and had no interest in learning the language anymore. It sucks that I stopped — I feel it the most now because I work in an airport and there are so many Chinese tourists but I can’t communicate with them :-/
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I've been 'learning' Japanese since primary school. But I use 'learning' loosely'; in primary school it was a 60 minute lesson once a week, learning a few words and watching studio Ghibli movies in Japanese with English subtitles. From year 7 onwards though, naturally the workload increased. Now I'm on the way to studying Japanese at Uni!
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Which of these have you found most challenging?
Mandarin/Canto.
The writing is brutal and the internal logic of both languages (which is pretty similar) is just so foreign to an English speaker, whereas the romance languages above + Serbian are each pretty similar to English.
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I've been 'learning' Japanese since primary school. But I use 'learning' loosely'; in primary school it was a 60 minute lesson once a week, learning a few words and watching studio Ghibli movies in Japanese with English subtitles. From year 7 onwards though, naturally the workload increased. Now I'm on the way to studying Japanese at Uni!
Love that you're continuing with it! Japanese department at Monash is pretty good from what I know.
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Did Chinese during my early high school years but eventually dropped it because I am already fluent in it.
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Did Chinese during my early high school years but eventually dropped it because I am already fluent in it.
Do you think it was taught well through high school?
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I did french 7-12. Happy I continued with it, but I only kept going because I liked the language, was pretty good at it and didn't really want to do any other subjects. The way it was taught (particularly in VCE) made me quite disillusioned with the subject and I enjoyed it a lot less as a result.
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Do you think it was taught well through high school?
Not at all. I remember that my lessons consisted of just vocabulary, we didn't really touch on essay structure at all. My teacher based our tests on memorisation rather than application. It might have helped other students but not for me (and the thing is that my teacher wasn't even Chinese, so she made tonnes of mistakes with her grammar, characters, stroke order etc. time and time again)
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French in primary school, Chinese in year 8 (language classes only started from year 8 onwards in my first high school) and German for a year and a half in year 9 and 10. Considered doing German for VCE at various points in year 9 especially given that I went into it feeling pretty enthusiastic, but the only subject teacher in my school retired at the end of the year (ended up teaching in a private school though) and got a new teacher. That teacher tried to teach us grammer from scratch and rework our way of learning which made it for most people apart from a few people who learnt German at their previous school so the teacher allowed half the class the class to drop out and do research instead lol. Now, I'm not really interested in the language anymore, although it is admittedly useful given they the universities are almost free for international students.
Apart from that I speak Russian reasonably (Central Asian lineage), self-learnt it for the most part-especially the grammar component(and lived in the Central Asian region for two months). Also studied Spanish and Arabic in uni (still studying Spanish on my own, I feel it's more accessible to study it to an advanced level compared to other languages as there are really good grammar books). May revisit Arabic later. ANU also offers Hindi and Persian (amongst other less commonly taught Asian languages) through an open universities platform, which are both very appealing, so I'm still deciding which one I want to do first.
Back in my first high school, both Chinese and French were offered (increasingly elite public school in an inner suburbs area undergoing gentrification). There were 6-8 French classes compared to two Chinese classes in year 8 where it was compulsory to study a language. It was like that in both years that I was in the school. Why was there such a disproportion? I feel like it's down to the perceptions of Eurocentric superiority in culture and the humanities. I wonder whether the tide will shift to Asian languages in Australian schools...
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French in primary school, Chinese in year 8 (language classes only started from year 8 onwards in my first high school) and German for a year and a half in year 9 and 10. Considered doing German for VCE at various points in year 9 especially given that I went into it feeling pretty enthusiastic, but the only subject teacher in my school retired at the end of the year (ended up teaching in a private school though) and got a new teacher. That teacher tried to teach us grammer from scratch and rework our way of learning which made it for most people apart from a few people who learnt German at their previous school so the teacher allowed half the class the class to drop out and do research instead lol. Now, I'm not really interested in the language anymore, although it is admittedly useful given they the universities are almost free for international students.
Apart from that I speak Russian reasonably (Central Asian lineage), self-learnt it for the most part-especially the grammar component(and lived in the Central Asian region for two months). Also studied Spanish and Arabic in uni (still studying Spanish on my own, I feel it's more accessible to study it to an advanced level compared to other languages as there are really good grammar books). May revisit Arabic later. ANU also offers Hindi and Persian (amongst other less commonly taught Asian languages) through an open universities platform, which are both very appealing, so I'm still deciding which one I want to do first.
Back in my first high school, both Chinese and French were offered (increasingly elite public school in an inner suburbs area undergoing gentrification). There were 6-8 French classes compared to two Chinese classes in year 8 where it was compulsory to study a language. It was like that in both years that I was in the school. Why was there such a disproportion? I feel like it's down to the perceptions of Eurocentric superiority in culture and the humanities. I wonder whether the tide will shift to Asian languages in Australian schools...
Russian seems like such an interesting language; it's pretty uncommon as a subject but I think it'd be fascinating to learn :) I'm also interested to hear how you go learning Hindi/Persian.
As someone who studied French from years 7-12 and also observed the massive popularity of French over Chinese at their high school, part of the reason I chose to study French over Chinese (and also Italian) is that the class environment seemed a little less intimidating for me since I knew there were usually pretty few experienced French speakers. On the other hand, there were quite a few students who spoke Chinese and Italian at home or had close links to the languages which had allowed them to learn them all their lives and I was kinda scared of being out of my depth :P Chinese characters also freaked me out a bit!! I wonder if other people had similar experiences? I will add, though, that I did genuinely enjoy French as a subject, love the language, and would definitely like to travel there in the future, so that also contributed a lot to my choice. (:
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did German from 7-12. loved learning the language but didn't really like the way they taught in class. i was good at the start but shit by the time i got into year 12, but it did end up being my best-scoring vce subject so i can't really say i extremely regretted it especially cos it kinda saved my atar :P
also did chinese sl for vce but that was done with an outside school. parents basically made me. chinese saved my atar too but i wouldn't recommend doing it, esp if you're of chinese background cos it's way too much effort imo. but it definitely is a very useful language considering where the world is heading today.
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Have only ever learnt Mandarin chinese at school from prep-year 10. Primary school was just a shitfest singing songs and learning the same sentences every year.
And in high school I learnt nothing because in general Chinese teachers in high school (from my experience - we had multiple teachers come and go) teach the complete wrong way.
They try to jam so much vocab down your throat that it becomes literally impossible to learn anything without spending hours of study per night into it from year 9 onwards. The pedagogy used is often a reflection of Chinese classes in China that just starts from a lower base and has a really fast pace. Most chinese tests from year 9 and 10 saw like 70% of the cohort fail and everyone had to get scaled up.
However throughout school, I had 2 teachers who spoke Chinese as a second/third language and literally all of my learning came from them (until I forgot it cos this was like grade 6-7). They taught at a pace slow enough that the subject wasn't a write off (5-10 words per week which is fine) + surrounding grammar and cultural learning. and the content did eventually progress unlike primary school chinese. In University I spent a fair amount of time doing Chinese and the methodology in Uni is similiar to how these 2nd language teachers taught. In the first 5 weeks of Chinese in Uni (which started from 0) I learnt more than in 10 years of chinese in school.
The thing that makes it difficult to learn as fast as other languages is because when you learn a language you generally learn spoken and written together - and the written component of chinese slows the pace down by a mile. I don't know how chinese teachers in year 9 expected kids to memorise 30 words with 1-4 characters per week + remember ones from previous weeks. Especially where you get a line or two in the wrong place and you just lose all the marks for it.
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Italian 7-8 and Japanese P-6
I have imo had a terrible experience with school LOTE. It was poorly taught in both my cases and I dropped it after it became optional in Year 9. I just don't think I ever engaged with it in the end. Perhaps it might have been different if it was taught by somebody else but I just don't think I was ever interested.. apart from the Lygon St excursion for Italian which was an absolute food fest. Typical of me to only remember that ;D
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French was compulsory in years 6-7, but I did not enjoy it as much as Japanese which I did from year 5, year 8 to year 10. I didn't really enjoy the way French was taught at school, even though I loved the process of learning it. I preferred Japanese a lot better because it was easier to learn imo and the class environment was great. I continued japanese through years 9 and 10 but dropped it before year 11 since I was more passionate for other subjects (eg. modern) besides japanese.
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Not exactly a secret that I took Japanese and Chinese during high school. As many know, I also continued Japanese at uni and have a minor in it.
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Top five so far:
1. French
2. Japanese
3. Chinese
4. Italian
4. Latin
Any surprises there?
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I learnt Japanese from year 7 to 10. Around year 8~9 my interest peaked and I ended up doing a lot of Japanese-related activities, even representing the school in Japanese speaking contests outside school. Then it just started dying down. When year 10 was over I dropped the subject as soon as possible and have not touched it since. In year 9 I could have full on conversations in Japanese and now the extent of my vocab are words which have been integrated into the English language, as well as some hiragana and kanji (kanji only because it's pretty much Chinese).
I did Chinese for VCE but also know German and have a very extensive knowledge of music-related French and Italian vocabulary ;D Funny Sad story, during the Christmas holidays I was in Italy and tried ordering food at a restaurant in Italian (after practicing for hours beforehand), only for the lady at the counter to say "Just speak English dude".
Chinese characters also freaked me out a bit!!
I have never read anything more relatable in my life. I mean just look at this character!
Top five so far:
5. Latin
I get that Latin has insane scaling and is good for VCE but I can't imagine having it on your resume ;D
"Do you guys serve time-travelers here? Because I'd be the perfect guy for the job."
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Butting in late here but:
I did Japanese for grade 5 and 6, and then Italian from 7-10.
I would've probably kept Italian right through VCE, but I didn't for various reasons- including the fact I wanted to do psych 1/2 and keep my other subjects without my timetable clashing, and it didn't run in my year for either 1/2 or 3/4, and I didn't want to have a distance subject.
I try to keep practicing my Italian though, but I've gotten a little lazy recently oops :-[
Top five so far:
1. French
2. Japanese
3. Chinese
4. Italian
4. Latin
Any surprises there?
Not really too surprising, I guess! :)
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Top five so far:
1. French
2. Japanese
3. Chinese
4. Italian
4. Latin
Any surprises there?
I'm surprised German's not there actually (every high school I considered going to offered German).
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Top five so far:
1. French
2. Japanese
3. Chinese
4. Italian
4. Latin
Any surprises there?
I think that the majority of people that voted Chinese meant that they went to Chinese school on the weekends rather than it being offered as part of the school curriculum. Quite a few private schools offer Chinese but only a handful of public schools do so. Collingwood College (coincidentally near the first high school I went to) though only offers Chinese.
As someone who studied French from years 7-12 and also observed the massive popularity of French over Chinese at their high school, part of the reason I chose to study French over Chinese (and also Italian) is that the class environment seemed a little less intimidating for me since I knew there were usually pretty few experienced French speakers. On the other hand, there were quite a few students who spoke Chinese and Italian at home or had close links to the languages which had allowed them to learn them all their lives and I was kinda scared of being out of my depth :P Chinese characters also freaked me out a bit!! I wonder if other people had similar experiences? I will add, though, that I did genuinely enjoy French as a subject, love the language, and would definitely like to travel there in the future, so that also contributed a lot to my choice. (:
Understand where you are coming from and the factors that vary from school to school that may contribute. My school was about 2/3 Anglo/European and 1/3 Asian (Vietnamese and East-timorese for the most part, spoke little if any Chinese) and no difference in the quality of teachers between languages (actually heard that the French teachers were mediocre). Unfortunately it seemed that class mixed with ethnicity were telling in language choice. The Asians, almost all of them lived the the local area (public housing and some parts were fairly poor) except for the Indians (as far as I know, the few in my school were middle-class and did not live locally) chose Chinese along with some Anglo/European students. The Indians and all the other Anglo-Europeans chose French (who did not live in tbe area, were middle to upper class for the most part and needed to go through a selection process to get in the school). Agree that an unfamilar writing system can throw people off especially if not exposed from young. Wasn't in that position so never factored it into my language choice. Also agree that interest in the culture and language is important- probably why I'm studying Hindi and Persian and hopefully French and Japanese in the future over Chinese and Arabic (uni teacher was good, but didn't find the teaching style enjoyable-given the few teachers in the department it was an important factor in whether to continue. Also prefer Persian because it's so beautiful, easier grammar and it's spomen in Central Asia). Can also say that Russian and Spanish are amazing. Would study Chinese if I need it for a job/career though. Mongolian would be good for me personally but the pronounciation is one of the toughest out there so we will see 15 years from now lol.
Still think that the perception of Asian languages and culture (apreciation is exoticised in a shallow manner in many cases) is problematic in Australia. Not just because we need more people that speak critical Asian language for economic/political reasons, but to break down the manner in which humanities and culture are studied in Australia. Many Asians I met (mostly middle-class) seem to hold sentiments of Eurocentric superiority in language, humanities and culture (legacy of colonialism) and would learn a European language ahead of their own culture.
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^Interesting thoughts. When I was in Year 7, my (public) school offered Japanese and French, but now offers those two plus Chinese. I think it's a great subject to offer!
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I did three languages for VCE: Indonesian, French and Latin.
I took Indo early in year 10 for reasons which are a bit too complicated to elaborate here but it was a very good experience for developing study skills etc. Plus I ended up with a 43 study score, despite having no in-country experience :) I really enjoyed the cultural studies side of things too.
In year 12, I did French at school and Latin via distance ed. French was probably my favourite language - it sounds so beautiful and I love the literature/art associated with it. I don't understand why all my friends dropped it. Latin was really painful at the start since I only picked it up in year 10 and never felt like I was on top of the grammar. It was very complicated and confusing but that made it more exciting when I did succeed in SACs etc. Also I loved the ancient history associated with it and studying The Aeneid.
Anyway, now I'm studying French and Spanish at uni. I did year 7-9 Spanish and have always wanted to get back to it and it seems to complement French well. Some may think I'm a bit crazy for doing two languages AND law but languages have always been my passion and I tend to pick up vocab/grammar pretty fast. I hope I'll be able to speak 7 or 8 one day.
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I did three languages for VCE: Indonesian, French and Latin.
I took Indo early in year 10 for reasons which are a bit too complicated to elaborate here but it was a very good experience for developing study skills etc. Plus I ended up with a 43 study score, despite having no in-country experience :) I really enjoyed the cultural studies side of things too.
In year 12, I did French at school and Latin via distance ed. French was probably my favourite language - it sounds so beautiful and I love the literature/art associated with it. I don't understand why all my friends dropped it. Latin was really painful at the start since I only picked it up in year 10 and never felt like I was on top of the grammar. It was very complicated and confusing but that made it more exciting when I did succeed in SACs etc. Also I loved the ancient history associated with it and studying The Aeneid.
Anyway, now I'm studying French and Spanish at uni. I did year 7-9 Spanish and have always wanted to get back to it and it seems to complement French well. Some may think I'm a bit crazy for doing two languages AND law but languages have always been my passion and I tend to pick up vocab/grammar pretty fast. I hope I'll be able to speak 7 or 8 one day.
This is so good. So are pretty much all of your Arts units atm language-based?
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This is so good. So are pretty much all of your Arts units atm language-based?
Yeah! I might get non-language based electives later on, it depends if I decide to do Spanish as a minor or a second major.