Greek

I've been going back and forth and back and forth on whether I wanted to take Greek this semester. You see, I'd love to learn Greek. The only problem is that Greek class meets every day for 3 (that's right, 3!) semesters. If you do less than 3 semesters, you don't get the language credit (which I need.) Ridiculous.

Missouri's a strange school. We're required to learn two languages that relate to our field/dissertation,etc. but the university only actually offers Ancient Greek, Russian, French, Spanish, German, Italian and occasionally, an Arabic course. This may seem like a lot of languages, but Missouri's a school of well over 30,000 students and nearly everyone has to take languages.

But alas, the other issue is my research interests--which lie in Scandinavia. It would make tons of sense for me to study Norwegian, Swedish, Icelandic, Old Norse, Danish or possibly even Welsh. But no such luck at MU. I've been trying to get an exception made so I might study one of these elsewhere instead of at Missouri. I'm hopeful; it's still on the table--but our grad studies director's not too excited by the idea of exceptions.

Alas, after finding out that Ancient Greek and Biblical Greek are different (Ancient Greek's much harder) and spending two hours a night studying every night last week, I dropped Greek. I'd love to learn it, but I don't think I can keep up that kind of pace/time commitment with my other teaching, classes etc.

So, I'm back to the drawing board. I think I'll be able to pass a Spanish translation exam (there's a refresher course in the summer), which will take care of one language. A friend has suggested studying Italian on my own and seeing if I might test out of that too, instead of taking all the courses. Can someone really teach themselves a language well enough to do that? Well, she was able to. I'm not sure yet...so we'll see. Some of the other classes (like French and German) let you take one semester of the language and still get the required language credit. But however I'm going to relate any of these to my research interests...now that's a good question.