So Sarah and I are thinking of signing up for language classes at City University in the Autumn. There’s a choice, but the trouble is matching it to our levels of ability.
Now I did two language GCSEs – French (eight years’ study) and German (three years’ study) – getting on for 20 years ago. I’ve had to use German in my work, French to a lesser extent. I’ve also learnt some Greek, Spanish, Italian and Japanese, but only at a very functional level
Sarah, however, has A-levels in Russian, French, German and Spanish. Her Spanish is much better than mine; her French is better than mine; her German is about the same as mine, maybe not quite as good.
Here are our choices for languages to learn:
- French (all levels),
- Spanish (all levels),
- Arabic (level one only),
- German (level two and three),
- Italian (level one, two and three) and
- Japanese.
Level two means “rusty GCSE” or better. Level three means “rusty A-level” or better.
So which should we pick?
- German’s on a bad day for both us, but would probably be the most useful for me, since I’m frequently dealing with German companies and we’d both enjoy getting ourselves properly fluent again
- French is interesting but we’d essentially be attending different classes for that, which defeats the point of learning a language together.
- Ditto Spanish (no hablo Espa?ɬ�ol mui bien).
- Japanese would be utterly useless for us both but would be interesting
- Arabic would be interesting, but we’d have to stop after a year
- Italian would be fun and potentially useful since we might actually go on holiday to Italy again. But I’ve already done a few lessons, so I’d be at a very slight advantage.
It’s looking like Italian at that moment, with German the main contender. Anyone recommend a different choice?