[j7ake]

One thing I never understood were people who paid money to go to an American university to major in a language like French, German, or Japanese.

Why don’t they just take their 60k a year tuition and spend it living in the country that actually speaks that language?

I’ve seen third or fourth year students majoring in French with worse language abilities than the engineering students who spent a semester on exchange to France or Switzerland.

Some majors are a complete waste of time and money.

[allturtles]

You should think of the French department at a college as being analogous to the English department; they are literature departments and the professors are specialized in particular domains of literature and the coursework is centered on literature. e.g. see e.g. see this schedule of course requirements [0]. It requires just 1 year of advanced study in learning to speak and write the language itself, the rest is on reading, criticism, and specialized areas of French literature.

One could argue that learning about 17th century French drama makes this even more of a waste of time and money. Personally I think it's great that society has enough surplus wealth that people with a passion for particular topics can 'waste' their time in this way.

[0]: https://www.ohio.edu/cas/modern-languages/undergraduate/fren...

[j7ake]

Maybe for French. But I doubt this is the case for more distant languages like Japanese and Russian.

Are American undergrads studying Tolstoy in Russian in the Russian department?

[foxyv]

Getting a loan to attend a 4-year university is obscenely easy. Getting a loan or grant to visit a foreign country is difficult. However, if you want to visit a foreign country as an English teacher, having a 4 year degree in the native language of that country makes it MUCH easier.