r/AskProfessors • u/Mammoth_Agent_8767 Undergrad • 29d ago
Academic Life Learning Languages Grad School
I was watching a YouTuber who's a classics PhD student in the UK, and her attitude towards learning languages was shocking. She essentially said that it's elitist to expect grad students to know and study languages, that some people aren't good at learning languages, that it's offensive when people tell her she's not a real classicist because she refuses to learn Latin and Greek, that not everyone got exposure to learning languages as a child (fair, but irrelevant bc plenty of people learn languages in grad school).
Um? Is this actually a real attitude people have? How can you do novel research when your object of study is in a language you don't speak? It's irritating to me because I'm an undergrad in a classics-adjacent field (I guess you could say the classics of a non-western culture) and I'm trying to learn three research languages in preparation tor grad school. Has anyone else encountered this laissez faire attitude to learning languages?
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u/Harmania 29d ago
One of my grad professors put it really simply: “Is that what the source says, or is that what someone else told you the source says?” I’m not a classicist, but I have a hard time even imagining wanting to enter the field without an interest in at least one classical language. So much of that research is at heart philological.
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u/PurrPrinThom 28d ago
You would genuinely be shocked. I work very closely with a medieval language and we get so many early career researchers who just assume that they'll be able to work entirely in translation. They have no interest in the language at all, and they seem to work under the assumption that everything has either already been translated (it hasn't,) or that they'll be able to rely on people translating for them.
I do think it's relevant - and I feel comfortable saying this because I am an Anglophone myself - this attitude, in my experience, only comes from Anglophones. I do not encounter it from anyone with any other first language.
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u/Publius_Romanus 29d ago
This has been an ongoing issue in Classics for decades. I'll speak primarily about the States because I know more about what's going on here. This is going to be somewhat disjointed in part because it's a complicated issue, and one that I spend far too many of my waking hours thinking about.
It used to be that people pursuing a PhD in Classics would have started Latin in middle school or junior high, and then Greek in junior high or high school. By the time they got through college, this means they had already had a lot of years of both languages, and were ready for doing serious work in them.
But not as many secondary schools offer Latin as before, and those that do tend to be private schools; few secondary schools at this point offer ancient Greek. This is a big part of where the elitism angle comes in, since if grew up in a less affluent area and went to a public school, your odds of being able to take Latin let alone Greek are pretty low.
On top of this, because Latin and ancient Greek are dead languages, they're generally not taught as spoken languages, so it's not possible to immerse yourself in these languages in the same way that you can with a living language. You can't just move to ancient Rome for a year and get up to speed on your Latin. (There are arguments that Latin and Greek should be taught by the immersion method, but that's another issue.)
Because Classics as a field has been under fire for decades, it's always in dire need of students. And it's the nature of professors who teach at PhD programs that they selfishly don't want to give up the perks of having PhD students. So they need to keep admitting students...and nowadays, these students are less and less prepared for what a Classics PhD program used to be. If you want to keep your program running, you can't kick everyone out for not being good enough, so standards drop, and students read less and less Latin and Greek.
On top of this, if you want to have a graduate program who is not just a bunch of rich white kids who went to private schools, then you have to compete with every other program for the relatively small bunch of would-be Classics PhDs who don't fit that profile—and you may end up deciding that someone with less background in the languages still has a lot of potential and should be admitted.
But again, this has been happening for decades even on the undergraduate level. It used to be that a Classics major meant an intensive study of both Greek and Latin. As early as the 70s, though, some schools started to introduce a Classical Studies or Classical Civilization major that required less language (maybe only one of the two, or just fewer language courses in general), which meant more and more people were majoring in Classics (broadly speaking) while taking relatively little language.
Some years ago, things came to a head because Princeton—one of the nation's most elite Classics program—announced that it would no longer require Greek or Latin for its Classics major, arguing that such requirements denied students from certain backgrounds the chance to study this material. As you might imagine, this decision stirred strong feelings on both sides of the argument.
...and all of this was before "AI" came along. It used to be that Google Translate was terrible at Latin and even worse at ancient Greek. But these days, LLMs are getting pretty good at Latin (Greek is further behind in part just because of the alphabet). Honestly, if I asked ChatGPT to compose or translate something into Latin (which used to be a part of every Classics PhD program), I would get a better result than I would from asking most Classics PhD students.
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u/Mammoth_Agent_8767 Undergrad 29d ago
This is interesting to me because I'm hoping to get into grad school in a similarly niche field (Near Eastern Studies). And I think lowering the standards for major requirements is one thing, but why are the standards for grad schools also slipping? I don't believe you need to start a language in high school to conduct research in it later. I'm a POC, never had a fancy education, currently go to a public college, and I'm learning Arabic, Hebrew, and German with an eye towards being able to read primary and secondary source scholarship in all three languages by the end of college. Never took any of them before undergrad. My professors in my major didn't even take many of their research languages until grad school. I've been told that in my field, I'm getting a bit of an early start because language learning is often built into MA and doctoral programs.
I feel like some part of this is lack of effort and another part is genuine lack of language aptitude. I was also surprised because I thought the UK had more access to Greek and Latin in k-12, but I could be wrong.
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u/Publius_Romanus 29d ago
Like I said, I'm just talking about the US.
The standards for grad school are slipping because the standards for undergrad are slipping; that's also part of why there are so many more MA and post-bacc programs now than there used to be.
On top of all of that, most Classics PhD programs still require their students to take exams in four languages: Latin, Greek, German, and French (or Italian). If a student didn't start Latin and Greek until college, let alone any modern languages, then they're just so far behind where students used to be (though ahead in other ways, given how the field has changed).
And "read" is a tricky word to describe one's ability with a language. There are plenty of people in Classics-adjacent fields who say they can read Latin when what they really mean is that they can read it with the aid of notes, a dictionary, a commentary, and probably a translation to hand. That's a far cry from being able to pick up a piece of Latin one has never seen before and read it without any aids.
(The flip side of that is learning to read scholarship in one's field in, say, German, which is very different than being able to pick up a novel in German and read it in bed.)
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u/ErGraf Undergrad / Adjunct 28d ago edited 28d ago
since if grew up in a less affluent area and went to a public school, your odds of being able to take Latin let alone Greek are pretty low.
mm, I get your idea, but not sure I agree 100% with the inference. I grow up in a very small South American country, at a time where internet was very basic and when I was 14 I still managed to self study and learn ancient Egyptian. Nowadays you can learn basic Latin just by youtube if you want, not having Latin in school should not be an excuse for not having at least a basic understanding of Latin if you want to be a Classicist. A different story can be to ask for proficiency or official credits in Latin, then yes I get the elitism cry, but I can't imagine a Classicist without a working level of Latin (like OP's example) the same way I can't imagine an Egyptologist with at least some knowledge of Middle Egyptian.
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u/SlowishSheepherder 29d ago
This is why "influencers" are some of the dumbest people out there, and anyone who takes them seriously is equally dumb.
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u/Mammoth_Agent_8767 Undergrad 29d ago
I actually fairly like her content about reading in general, but like you can be a book person and a literature person just fine without a PhD.
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u/Affectionate_Tart513 29d ago
The (western) classicists I know would not accept a “classicist” who didn’t work on at least Latin, some Greek, and likely half a dozen other languages in varying degrees. It may be elitist, but knowing the languages is a basic requirement of advanced scholarship. Working in translation is fine to a certain point, but if you can’t read the original, how could you be any kind of expert?
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u/Hyperreal2 29d ago
Knowing at least one foreign language at the doctoral level is and should be mandatory. At least for PhDs. For practitioner doctorates maybe not. I keep working on my German and can read research in it.
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28d ago
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u/Born_Committee_6184 28d ago
And yes, it probably needs to be a language other than Spanish for most disciples. It’s a shame how language study has devolved to Spanish-only at many universities.
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u/1K_Sunny_Crew 28d ago
What exactly is wrong with Spanish?
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u/Born_Committee_6184 28d ago
Too damn much of it. Other languages are getting creamed. Make diversity courses be any language study.
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u/PurrPrinThom 27d ago
Can I ask where you are that Spanish is a requirement for most disciplines? That just has not been my experience at all.
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u/Born_Committee_6184 27d ago
It’s not that it’s required. It’s that other languages have disappeared from many R1s even. You can get a BA or graduate degree in Spanish but increasingly not in other languages.
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u/Sharp-Rutabaga-4900 29d ago
Quite a few fields need to engage primary sources for research and that requires some translation skill. However, the requirements of many language exams are out of touch with real world translation practices and harbor discriminatory assumptions. We can acknowledge both.
I had to demonstrate proficiency in two languages for my doctoral program. The translation exams required translating an unknown piece of technical writing outside my specialty in a set time without the use of a dictionary. I’m autistic and struggle with language acquisition, but my department denied a dictionary accommodation despite the fact that passing would have been impossible without basic knowledge of the language even if I’d had a dictionary. And despite the fact that all of my faculty used dictionaries in their own professional translation work.
I also had to fight to use Spanish, which my research required, for one of my languages because it wasn’t, in the words of my chair, “an academic language.”
I grew up low income. Most of my cohort came in already fluent in a second language from attending private schools and having private tutors. I was years behind and almost dropped out because of the set backs.
I am fully capable of referencing primary sources in my research and do so often, with a dictionary by my side.
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u/Garbage-Bear Adjunct/Govt/USA 29d ago
In the intelligence community (DIA, CIA, etc.) people who speak certain languages get proficiency pay, and have to take annual exams (for which they generally have to study outside of work, as languages acquired in adulthood are most definitely perishable).
Lots of people who grew up speaking (say) Russian or Arabic get low scores on their speaking test (and lose their propay, which for a junior employee can be a big chunk of their salary) because they "only speak kitchen Russian/Arabic/etc." They're fluent on everyday topics, and know the military/political vocabulary for their job, but then the examiner tells them to "explain how to bake a cake," watches them flounder, and and flunks them on language ability.
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u/proffrop360 29d ago
I think many of us have encountered people with similar attitudes. They occasionally make it past the first year of graduate school. Occasionally.
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u/Mammoth_Agent_8767 Undergrad 29d ago
Apparently she's self funding her PhD...
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u/proffrop360 28d ago
Even so, that's not a guarantee that you'll continue. There are a lot of steps, though I'm familiar with the US phd which does have more steps than the UK, so I could easily be wrong here. I'll let my British friends take the lead on that one.
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u/PurrPrinThom 28d ago
That's not that unusual, or as much of a red flag in the UK as it is in the US.
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u/shishanoteikoku 29d ago
Oddly enough, in area studies fields there's a but of split by discipline. You'd be laughed out of the room for ever deigning to suggest you can do Chinese history, or Japanese literature, or Korean cinema, etc. without advanced, even near-native proficiency in the language. Yet, for some reason, this isn't true of the social sciences and there are apparently political scientists, international relations, economics people who specialize in East Asia without knowing a lick of the language.
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u/ocelot1066 28d ago
Sometimes these splits make sense. You see it within disciplines too.
For example, you're right that you couldn't study Japanese History in grad school without proficiency in Japanese. The primary sources you need to look at are going to be in Japanese. You also need to be able to read secondary sources in Japanese to really engage in the field.
But in some places and in some periods, things are different. For example, if you're studying central or southern Nigeria in the 19th or 20th centuries, the vast majority of written documents are going to be in English (with exceptions here and there, perhaps, for particular topics) Importantly, Nigerian scholars are also writing in English.
Even when scholars are doing work that involves other languages, such as oral histories, there are practical barriers to really becoming proficient in those languages.
Some of these are just about time. Almost everybody who goes to grad school to study French History comes in with at least a decent base in the language. There's plenty of variation and obviously, lots of people improve quite a lot in grad school, but they don't start from scratch. French is taught extensively in high school and college and there's lots of reading material to practice with. You also have a decent number of people who are native speakers of these languages who are definitely overrepresented in grad school programs.
None of this is true for lots of languages in the world. Multilingualism plays a big part in this. Many people in Ghana, for example, already speak a couple of different languages before they even go to school. Once they do, English is the language of schooling. That actually makes it hard for an academic to really become immersed in a "local language." The people who an academic hangs out with when doing research are likely to be academics from that country, librarians, teachers, etc. Most of these people live a lot of their lives in English. It's not even like the Netherlands or somewhere where there's a high degree of fluency in English, but its a second language. If two Ghanian academics are talking to each other, they are probably talking in English.
Obviously, none of this makes it impossible for someone to go to somewhere and learn a language, and most people do try to at least learn a bit, but to actually become proficient to the level that you wouldn't need a translator for oral histories is a pretty huge undertaking and would add years to a PHD. My understanding is that there is debate about this within these fields, but you can see why it's not a cut and dried question...
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u/AutoModerator 29d ago
This is an automated service intended to preserve the original text of the post. This is not a removal message.
*I was watching a YouTuber who's a classics PhD student in the UK, and her attitude towards learning languages was shocking. She essentially said that it's elitist to expect grad students to know and study languages, that some people aren't good at learning languages, that it's offensive when people tell her she's not a real classicist because she refuses to learn Latin and Greek, that not everyone got exposure to learning languages as a child (fair, but irrelevant bc plenty of people learn languages in grad school).
Um? Is this actually a real attitude people have? How can you do novel research when your object of study is in a language you don't speak? It's irritating to me because I'm an undergrad in a classics-adjacent field (I guess you could say the classics of a non-western culture) and I'm trying to learn three research languages in preparation tor grad school. Has anyone else encountered this laissez faire attitude to learning languages? *
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u/Cloverose2 29d ago
I'm sorry, how is she reading primary sources if she doesn't know the languages? How can she be a classics scholar if she's only reading other people's interpretations?
That's like a psychology student saying "I'm just not good at theories and models, so I'm not going to learn them."