Help! I will be finishing my associates in history in May and moving on to a university in the fall. I know I want to continue with a history degree - I plan on obtaining my PhD and teaching college. But I can’t decide what area of history I want to concentrate on… I have narrowed it down to Eastern European, Middle Eastern, and Asian. What would be a good foreign language to take?
As for a minor… I am looking at Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Judaic Studies, Anthropology, Women’s Studies, or a minor in the language that would be most useful to me in my studies (such as Chines, Japanese, French, etc.)
Understand beforehand that I’m completely unqualified to answer your question. While I have a Minor in History, I’ve never used it professionally, it was just that I liked history. However, and this is just an opinion, it seems that if you could concentrate on studying a region that you like that might also be on the verge of a burgeoning commercial expansion in the near future, then you’ve increased the number of potential employers beyond just acedemia to the commercial marketplace as well.
For instance, you said you’re interested in asian studies. China and much of the Far East is quickly becoming a larger player on the world market. Companies wishing to do business there are possibly going to be interested in the history and culture so they can properly configure their marketing efforts. Maybe you could tailor your expertise to be of benefit to them as well.
Good jobs are getting tougher and tougher to find. This strategy might give you more avenues within which to explore. Again, just MHO.
Yeah…good luck with that whole “teaching college” plan. No, really…I hope you get to. But if I were you, I’d have several back-ups plans prepared. More than several.
To that end, I would recommend Mideastern or Asian History, with the appropriate language(s) as a minor. Go for complements that will get you a job. Strike Medieval/Renaissance Studies, Women’s Studies and Judaic Studies right off the bat. Anthro is fun (I have a degree in Anthro) but it oesn’t pay the bills. Asian History with a minor in Chinese will always keep you employed, somewhere. Mideastern History would not be as sure a thing.
Sorry if I rained on your parade, but I have seen too many PhD’s driving taxis to be real positive about a career in academia.
silenus, you didn’t rain on my parade! I know that getting a job teaching college will be very difficult. That is one reason why I don’t want to concentrate on European or British or American history. It seems like everyone and their fish have gone to school for that.
lieu, thank you for your post. You actually confirmed some of my own thoughts… “If I can’t teach, maybe I can atleast live somewhere in Asia in the lap of luxery doing work for some big company…”
And another question… Just how hard is Chinese compared to, say… French?
Very! There are no cognates…you know a lot of French vocabulary just from speaking English. My cousin has gone through Monterey Language School (Army) twice…once for German and once for Japanese. He rates German at about a 4 difficulty level, and Japanese at about an 8. Chinese is even worse.
If you’re going to concentrate on studying a part of the world where the local histories are not readily available in English, then choosing an indiginous language as your minor is a good idea. This is especially true when the language in question is something with which you do not already have some degree of familiarity.
As to how difficult learning Chinese will be, compared to French or Spanish, consider the following.
A completely different writing system. I don’t know how Chinese languages are normally taught to English speakers, whether there is an agreed-upon transliteration to the Roman alphabet. But eventually you will have to contend with learning to use pictograms (of which there are thousands).
Availability of conversation partners. Some people have the ability to learn languages out of a book, but most people learn languages best through interaction. I took Latin in college, and had a very difficult time with it because there was nobody with whom I could practice speaking.
Romance languages might include a handful of sounds that aren’t normally used in English, creating some difficulty during the learning process. Chinese may very well have a great many sounds completely different from anything used in English. So if you do not have a good ear, you could be in for a long slog. Oh yes, Chinese languages (IIRC) are tonal, which means that the same sound can mean different things, depending on whether the pitch of your voice is steady, rises, or falls.
In short, is it tougher to learn Chinese than French? Oh, yes. But certainly not impossible. And who knows, you just might have a natural gift for it.
Asian Studies encompasses a great many diverse cultures spread over a huge landmass. You can take your pick from China, Japan, India, Korea, etc. They’re all excellent choices though I, personally, found Indian history and culture especially fascinating. Languages include: Chinese (Mandarin or Catonese), Japanese, Korean, Hindi, Sanskrit, Thai, and a great many others.
Similarly, the Mideast is another diverse place and a very topical choice. The sheer variety of ethnic groups is astonishing and the area has had a great deal of interaction not only with Europe, but Africa and Asia as well. Languages include: Arabic, Kurdish, Persian, Turkish, and others.
Of the languages, Arabic, Chinese, and Japanese are probably the most marketable. Unfortunately for you, none of them is related in the slightest to English and all employ alien writing systems. The only remotely identifiable language for you will be Turkish, which utilizes the Roman alphabet but is otherwise entirely unrelated to English. Persian is an Indo-European language, and so shares some distant ancestry with English.
I majored in history with the World Wars as my focus and I tried to minor in Political Science but I burned out on all the reading. My foreign language skills include French, German, Spanish, and a little Hungarian. I amassed my language skills before I settled on a major just because I thought it was important to be multi-lingual. If I was in your shoes, I would couple my history degree with something practical. Like economics or engineering. Also, good luck on the whole goal to become a professor. The market sucks and what few jobs are available, are at the mercy of political bullshit.
See my previous comments on ease of Japanese. It is easier than Chinese, but not as easy as the Romance languages, for example. I second AmericanMaid’s suggestion as to supplemental skills. There is good money to be made in the International Business world. This should ease the sting a bit if you can’t find a position in academia.
Pretty much any language you could chose in Asian/Middle Eastern studies is going to be difficult to learn for a native English speaker. There are a few Indo-European languages, however, which share some ancestry with English. The major ones are: Hindi, Sanskrit, Russian, Persian (Farsi). None of them are written in the Roman alphabet, though Russian is written using the Cyrillic alphabet, which is somewhat similar.
