re: #366 lawhawk

Depends on your area of concentration and need for language skills. I was a history major and didn’t need need special language training, but if you’re going for a Ph.D, you might need some to do original research/scholarship in an area - but that’d be language skills outside the History department.

I had a language requirement for both my MA and PhD. It wasn’t very rigorous. For my MA, I just look classes at a local community college. For my PhD, I just had to translate a paragraph with the help of a dictionary. My advisor told me that as an Americanist all I really needed to be able to do is recognize whether I needed to pay someone to translate a document.

For non-Americanists, the language requirement was still the same, but they obviously had to know a language better than the requirement tested for.