Modern Languages

Your first year is closely structured. You will attend oral classes and courses on the grammatical structure of your language(s), translation into and out of the language(s) and, in some of the languages, comprehension. You will also attend introductory lecture courses and participate in seminars and/or tutorials on literature. If you study either French or German as a single language, you will take a range of additional options in that language in the first year, such as literary theory and film studies. If you study any other language by itself then you must take Linguistics as well in the first year (see Modern Languages and Linguistics).

Your other years of study give you more freedom to choose the areas you wish to focus on, from a range of options. You will have tutorials and language classes each week in each of the languages being studied. Students studying courses with Polish take this as a subsidiary language, beginning in the second year. Catalan, Galician, Provençal, Yiddish and most of the Slavonic languages may also be taken as additional options.

Modern Language students usually spend the third year of their course abroad. This is often as a paid language assistant in a foreign school, though you may also undertake other work abroad or study at a foreign university. (The exception to this is for those students taking Beginners’ Russian, who are required to spend the second year – as opposed to the third year – of their studies on a specially designed eight-month language course in the city of Yaroslavl.) We encourage you to spend as much as possible of your vacations in the countries whose languages you are studying. Financial support, including travel scholarships, may be available from your college and/or the faculty.

Students are welcome to apply for deferred entry for any language courses except those including Beginners’ Russian.

Your week’s work will include a tutorial in, or organised by, your college, language classes on different skills relating to the language(s) you study, and probably three to four hours of lectures per subject.

› View College options for Modern Language courses

B. = Beginners' course