Combining languages...

I thought you could only do 2 languageas at Cambridge though? I don't know anywhere that will let you do 4. I'll probably pick up Italian as a third language if I end up at Durham.

they will group you to an extent- with the italian groups, it was done by a short questionnaire, and those who had gcse/done loads of language courses were put in one group, and everyone else (we'd done nowt) were just spread at random. that's just for the language classes though. literature supervisions were done seperately, with a random mix of people.

with spanish, they may give you a short test, i'm not sure. they did it for german (even though we're post-alevel!) but it ended up that we were just grouped in colleges- all the sidney, pembroke, jesus and queens people ended up in one class etc, unless they were practically native speaker, in which case they went into the 'super-group'. don't think this happens for french though, so don't worry

as for taking up extra languages, you can do this via the language centre,they will run classes in most modern langs, including italian. they also have loads of material on hundreds of other languages for you to teach yourself, if you wish. you can take diplomas in these languages if you want, you won't get to degree level though obviously