Thank you for doing this tutorial. My PhD program is relatively short for a North American one (4 years in total) but language learning is definitely a huge area of confusion for most graduate students. It seems to depend hugely on your field of research. In my History department, they don’t take language learning seriously beyond a single research language (so if you study French history then you should learn French of course) but when I asked about learning a second research language I didn’t have much support from my department. I think there needs to be more resources on campuses for grad students to shore up languages. Certainly at my university there aren’t many summer intensive language courses It was really reassuring to hear your suggestion about learning a second research language as part of a longer term plan but which wouldn’t immediately inform dissertation research. Thank you!
Apologies. This may be a bit off-topic. It's certainly not a critique of you or of the advice you're giving here. But, it is my thoughts upon watching this video, so I hope you'll pardon me for ranting very briefly. Having done a PhD, I know from experience how essential it is, on a directly practical level, to have high proficiency in your primary research language under your belt when you first enter the PhD. BUT. I also know from personal experience how frustrating, difficult, and expensive it was - prior to getting into the PhD - to be constantly told to go gain that language ability first. Get it where? With what funding? Isn't there something horribly ironic about applying to go to school, and being told that you need to study and learn and know something before you can go there? I mean, isn't the point of going to school to learn /there/? Of course, it did work out for me in the end. I was extremely privileged to have wealthy family who could pay for my first MA, and the first year of my second MA (before I managed to get funding from the university), and I got funding from the US Dept of Education if I remember correctly to fund me attending an intensive program overseas for a year. But... yikes. Makes me wonder what other people do. Pay out of pocket for language classes at a local community college or Institut Francais sort of place or private tutoring until their language ability is good enough to get into the university where they would have been funded to take those language classes if only they could have gotten into the program without the language ability yet to begin with? It's a little bit like the "I can't get a job because I don't have experience / I can't get experience because I don't have a job" conundrum. I don't know the solution - again, I fully recognize the difficulty of trying to do well in a PhD program and succeed in doing good research if you don't already have the language skills ahead of time. But I do think that maybe this is another one of the broad, systemic, problems we need to address in how academia (grad school, in particular) operates.
