Spanish Language proficiency

3. A requirement = student will have achieved low intermediate Spanish proficiency by the time they reach their third year of medical school. Explain your current Spanish proficiency and/or plan for meeting this requirement (1900 characters)

In high school, I took two years of French. I know that Spanish is more practical but it wasn't a choice offered at my school. As it turned out, learning four more years of advanced French in college gave me a way to connect and converse with a whole different bunch of folks across the world. I was so fascinated by its culture that I decided to minor in French. Unfortunately the heavy upper-level courses in college didn't allow me to accommodate a time-consuming minor in languages.

Actually I started learning Spanish while working at the local cafe at Austin, Texas. In order to communicate with the kitchen staff, I forced myself to learn basic conversational Spanish. Interestingly, my years of French lessons really helped me in understanding the Spanish language. Most of the Spanish word are similar to French words because both languages come from the Latin.

In addition, I have traveled quite extensively and have developed an ear for different languages and regional dialects of the respective countries where I lived. Now I speak fluent Chinese and Indonesia and understand three other dialects--Sundanese, Cantonese and Taiwanese.

Thus, as much as my Spanish proficiency may be limited, I am confident that I can pick up the language pretty well through the conversational classes that I anticipate to take. In fact, I am really excited to take Spanish classes as I have always been an enthusiast for languages and cultures. I also plan to watch some of my favorite movies in Spanish. This is an easy and fun way of learning since many movies today comes with multilingual functions. Previously experiences have told me that this has a double effect--first it introduces me to words whose definition I'm already familiar with; and secondly due to its conversational style, it teaches me the an authentic way of conversing.

three other dialects of? You cannot speak fluent Chinese by the way, you speak fluent Mandarin. Also, I doubt that Indonesia is a language. You understand three other dialects? This implies that Indonesian is a dialect. Mandarin is a dialect.


How is it more practical? This is arguable. This sounds like your dissing French.

Your overall approach is good -- you have already proved that you can pick up new languages, one of which will be a great asset when it comes to learning Spanish. But, you need to start off by saying this and talking a bit about Spanish. At the moment the essay seems to jump around a bit too much, often touching on things that don't seem relevant at the time they are introduced, though you explain the relevance later on.

No, it doesn't sound like that at all. Spanish is more practical because many more people speak it. French used to be more practical, because it was the language of diplomacy. But that has changed.

Actually I started learning Spanish while working at the local cafe at Austin, Texas.

You could start here, and then backtrack to talk about French.

And I thought that I was learning Spanish for nothing.

Spanish is by far the more useful language to learn if you are in the States or concerned merely with being able to communicate with as many citizens of the world as possible. French would be better in certain areas, namely those where the language was widely spoken or an important part of the culture (obviously). Here in Canada, for instance, French is far more important than Spanish, even outside of Quebec, because it is a requirement for advancement in any federal government post.

I agree that the practicality of a second language is tied to the locale. Spanish is very useful in the United States, but I imagine that French would be handy if you lived in the northeastern states that are closer to Quebec. As Sean pointed out, French is much more practical for Canadians. It would be very useful in Africa as well.

We were vacationing in Quebec last week. My mom is proficient in Spanish and was able to read about 90% of the French (all of the signage and many of the publications are exclusively in French), but understanding the spoken language was a *totally* different story. There is a lot of overlap between the French and the Spanish so I think that emphasizing your proficiency in French would be important. They are both Romance languages ... not (necessarily) in the woo-your-lover way--Romance in this case refers to Rome. Your experience in French is documented by taking four years in college ... or maybe your semantics are a little tricky ... when you say that you weren't able to minor in languages, it leads me to believe that you might have only been planning to take those courses and then didn't follow through.

I have to admit, when you talk about the other languages--Chinese, Indonesian, and Sudanese (as in the Sudanese dialect of Arabic??), I find myself skeptical. Part of my skepticism could be that you don't substantiate how you became fluent in Chinese and Indonesian or how you are able to understand Arabic. There is certain expectation that comes along with the word fluent. Furthermore, Taiwanese isn't considered a dialect--Min is the dialect they speak in Taiwan--and using Sudanese instead of Arabic leads me to believe that you are bluffing. English, French, Chinese, and Arabic are all very different languages ... if you are applying to med school, I assume that you are fairly young. Too young, perhaps, to have lived in all of these other countries and gained proficiency in the languages. I know that you have a limited number of characters, but if you want to be believed, you may have to provide some backing or scale down your claims of being fluent.

They speak a type of southern min which is known as Taiwanese Minnan or just Taiwanese. I think it's ok to just say Taiwanese. Not everyone knows that Taiwanese people speak Minnan, which might cause confusion.

I get your point, llamapoop. It is valid. If the essay needed to explain proficiency in all languages, it might be more important to name Chinese dialects--I don't speak Chinese, but it is my understanding that they are *very* different from each other. Linguists don't agree on how many dialects there are or even if they should be considered dialects or separate (but related) languages. The way I interpret the classification, Min is a dialect while Taiwanese and Southern Min are sub-groups. It comes down to semantics and I readily concede that Taiwanese could also be called a dialect.

I called my uncle, because I am a dork like that and I like to learn, to ask his thoughts. My uncle lived in Taiwan and Malaysia for many years and is fluent in spoken Chinese (you have to learn the spoken and written languages separately as the writing system is logographic--he doesn't read or write Chinese fluently). He tried to explain to me the differences in the spoken dialects. He did say that Chinese is easier in many ways because the limited morphology means that there is only one verb form ... what? No present tense? No infinitive? No simple past, past-perfect, past-perfect progressive, subjunctive mood, or imperative?? No nominative, accusative, or dative? Man! I should have tried to learn Chinese instead of espańol.

Sorry I digress. Let me try to bring this back on topic ...

I find it hard to believe that a young person--of apparently normal intelligence--would be able to master English, French, Cantonese, Min, Indonesian, and Arabic. The languages are very divergent. I am not calling sad_an6el a liar. But as a reader, the claims bring up questions in my mind. Those questions could be answered by providing more of a context in the essay (My mother is Chinese, my dad is Indonesian and I went to an American school in Saudi Arabia where I studied French). To be credible, I feel like the writer needs more than an ease with language and extensive travel. The writer could also address this potential perception in the reader's mind by backing off the claim of fluency.

The purpose of this essay is to provide the admission personnel with a picture of an applicant's Spanish ability and/or a plan for acquiring a low intermediate proficiency. A writer wouldn't want to raise more questions in the readers' minds than he answers.

FYI I didn't say that I speak Min or Arabic.
FYI: SUndanese is what they speak in my hometown in indonesia. Yes i come from a ghetto village. Perhaps nothing compared to anything you can ever imagine.

To add to that, yes I do have a chinese and indonesian parent but I lived in Singapore that forced you to speak and write Chinese in School. And yes I intended to minor in French. Why is it so difficult for one believe in other people's talent. I am sure that there are many other things that I cannot do that you can.

If you read any of Noto's response to me you would know that Taiwanese=Minnan which is a type of Min dialect. According to Noto Sudanese is a dialect of Arabic. I am surprised that you did not know that Taiwanese is a type of Min since you say that you are fluent.


Read Noto's posts. We do believe that you have touched these languages but to what degree are you fluent? It seems like a grand claim.


Yes you should have :] I'll teach you if you want haha.

I said that the claims needed to be substantiated or scaled back ...


... by stating something similar to what you did here. I looked at your profile and it says that you are from the US. If your parents are foreign nationals and you were raised/schooled abroad, that's the kind of support you need for your claim.


But you did say:


Understand implies more than an exposure to admission officials. Even with a few years of Spanish instruction under my belt and travel to a few Spanish-speaking countries, I cannot claim that I understand Spanish. You might understand these languages/dialects, but again, you are going to need to incorporate just a little more into your essay to substantiate those claims.

There's no need to get defensive. We are trying to help you to see how a reader perceives your essay and the kinds of questions that the reader might have. Think about it ... if you were having a conversation with someone and the subject of languages came up, don't you think that the other person would want to know where/how you learned all of these divergent languages? this is a conversation with the admission officials, albeit a one-sided conversation. You need to anticipate questions that they might have and answer those questions.


I have no super-human powers. Dang it! I can put my foot behind my head. While that may show extraordinary flexibility for a seventeen-year old boy, I am sure that there are many other people in this world who can do it as well. Let me say, though, that essay writing (at least in this case) is not a competition. I am not trying to tear you down. I am trying to help you by pointing out how a reader perceives your writing.

It depends also on what is understood by "understand." After a few months of studying Spanish I could "understand" it in the sense that I could read newspaper articles in the language and pretty much follow what the author was saying. I couldn't, though, have understood anyone speaking it (as when I tried to follow movies in Spanish -- that was an unmitigated disaster) and reading a Spanish novel or more advanced literature of any sort would likely have been impossible. Also, my exposure to the language was brief enough that I've forgotten most of what I learned utterly, and will have to start over as I attempt to learn Spanish again. French, though, is different. After seven years in French immersion, enough of it is internalized that picking it up again wouldn't be too difficult.

The way you have written your essay, you could be taken as saying that you have a native speaker's understanding of all of the languages you mention. This is difficult to credit, unless you were raised with all of them or are a linguistic prodigy. It is much easier to believe that you have some familiarity with all of them, and can "understand" them to a limited extent, while possessing true fluency only of only two or three of them.

To the moderator
May i know the letter is ok or not
Kindly suggest me
thanks

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