Arabic, Hindi, Turkish, Greek, Malay-Indonesian, Swahili (spoken in eastern parts of Africa)...

As unfamiliar as each may sound, all are second languages offered at SNU as regular courses. SNU currently offers students courses on 16 different languages, including the ones mentioned above. Although Hanguk University of Foreign Studies does offer 19 languages, SNU offers a more diverse range of languages as part of its general elective course curriculum; Korea University has recently benchmarked SNU in offering many of the same courses.

Even up until the 1990s, the second language courses offered at SNU were limited to German, Japanese, Chinese, and Spanish - most of which were languages either taught in high school or related to existing departments at SNU. After the year 2000, however, the"Foreign Languages and Cultures" section of the general courses curriculum was drastically expanded as part of the university's aim to 'enable students to experience various cultures through a variety of languages.' With its work in conducting research on and teaching diverse languages, the Department of Linguistics led the change by offering courses on Arabic, Hindi, and Malay-Indonesian in 2002, followed by Swahili in 2003, then Turkish and Mongolian in 2006.

Although present-day university students are widely perceived as interested only in self-development for career building, the number of SNU students who are taking advantage of such intellectual luxuries as learning the languages mentioned above is not small. Not once has a foreign language course been cancelled due to insufficient registration; rather, on the contrary, foreign language courses, usually opened with a capacity of 20 students, have consistently been full.

PYO Yeong-Joon (4th year, College of Life Sciences), currently taking"Swahili and African Culture," says he has come to await each class."I registered for Swahili because I thought it was something that I would never have a chance to come by outside of university," he said."It's interesting to learn that people in Africa speak this language that I am now learning, while eating and living by a way of life that I have never had a chance to experience before." He now dreams of traveling all over Africa with his newly acquired Swahili skills.

YU In-Han (4th year, College of Law) is reconfirming the Korean language theory he learned in high school, that Korean belongs in the Ural-Altaic language family, by taking"Mongolian Language and Culture." Although Mongolian is written in Cyrillic characters, its sentence structure is known to be very similar to that of Korean. Learning Mongolian can be particularly enjoyable for Korean students, as it is possible to form sentences as soon as you learn the words.

KANG Tae-Seung (3rd year, Dept. of English Language and Literature) is a true 'language-lover' who has taken"Latin 1 & 2" as well as Greek. Influenced in his freshman year by Professor LEE Jae-Young's words that"There will be nothing to fear in studying anything once you have Latin and Greek under your belt," Tae-Seung blindly registered for Latin. He claims that as 'the phase when everything seemed confusing' passed and a new 'phase of clarification' came, he completely fell into the swing of Latin. Reading through famous texts written in ancient Rome in the course material, the Oxford Latin Course, added to the fun of learning Latin by deepening his understanding of Roman society. While he was at it, Tae-Seung decided to learn Greek, and he expressed wonder and interest upon seeing mathematical symbols such as alpha, beta, omega and pi used as alphabetic characters.

Students of rare foreign languages all agree that everyone in the class is 'equal' in that no one has learned these languages before, for instance in high school, as is the case with some other languages.

Leading students to learn and experience rare languages is also in touch with the fundamentals of linguistics education."A language is the quintessence of its culture, and learning a language allows us to approach the nature of the people who use it," Professor LEE Ho Young of the Department of Linguistics explains. Professor Lee pointed out that"Students hold to the mindset of powerful nations such as the United States, European countries and China" and stressed that"It is an important experience for students to learn about diverse cultures and form a balanced outlook of the world through the medium of rare languages."

Written by KIM Eun Young, SNU English Editor, eykim09@gmail.com   ?
Proofread by Brett Johnson, SNU English Editor