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Cambridge Modern and Medieval Languages (MML) Students and Applicants

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Duck and Cover

I'm not sure, seeing as they're only one year courses, I think they aim to get you to the same standard you would be after 1 year of ab initio. I don't know what that would be though....possibly somewhere between GCSE and AS Standard??

Do you know of anyone that's picked up new languages this way? If so, do they consider it worth the effort or is it generally considered better to study for a more academic module?

Reply 581

Duck and Cover

No no, they're really popular! People do get to a good standard language-wise and everyone I know who's picked up a language in this way has definitely enjoyed it. It's particularly popular with people doing two post a-level languages as well, because otherwise they have to do three 'normal' scheduled papers in the 2nd year, which can be perceived as being harder than doing two of these, plus a new language module. -- according to what people have told me, that is!

Reply 582

toddy21

Im just after looking at the reading list for the spanish literature paper in first year. Does anyone actually read all the books? Can anyone recommend the books that you should definitely read and maybe the ones that you could leave out?

Reply 583

Duck and Cover

Just had a look at the Sp2 course profile, they don't half make it confusing!! Why can't it be more like Fr2 or Ge3, 7 or so texts, clearly shown on the website. That's enough to put anyone off!

*just realised that wasn't a very constructive post*..!

Reply 584

Chubasco

toddy21

Ok, well I've done that paper this year and I've really enjoyed it - it was probably my favourite paper this year and I'd definitely recommend it. As to how many books you actually read, that does rather depend on your supervisors: I had fortnightly supervisions and ended up reading 6 books and working on 2 of the topics and that's probably fairly typical. A few people have had weekly supervisions (this generally tends to depend on how much of a slavedriver your DoS is) and have covered more, although hardly anyone will have read them all. I read Coplas, the Cervantes, Lazarillo de Tormes, Romancero gitano, Cien anos de soledad and I watched Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios. The department recommends that you read Lazarillo de Tormes, Romancero gitano and Cien anos de soledad before you get to Cambridge. These are three of the most popular texts and they do tend to be lectured on fairly early in the year (and Cien anos is hugely long. Very good, but quite a beast). Apart from that, Mujeres is definitely worth seeing just as a film and the Cervantes will also be quite useful, as it fits into a lot of the topics but I'd also recommend reading the texts that seem most interesting to you, as your supervisor will give you some degree of choice as to what you study. Basically, the only compulsory section in the exam (and you could take all your questions from that section if you wanted to), is the one where you write a comparative essay based around one (or more, if you choose to answer more than one question in that section) of five topics, with at least one text chosen from both Sections A and B. The only other text I got a chance to read was the Unamuno, which I also really enjoyed, even if I didn't actually study it. I'd have liked to have read all the texts really, and will probably try to read some more at some point.

Feel free to PM me if you've got any more questions. Hope I haven't put you off too much!

Reply 585

Duck and Cover

Wow, that sounds really involved for an introductory paper!

Reply 586

Chubasco

Duck and Cover

Wow, that sounds really involved for an introductory paper!

You think? It sounds really complicated written down but it isn't really. And using my test of how often I fall asleep in lectures, SP2 lectures were much more interesting than Fr2 lectures! Well, I really, really enjoyed it, so am probably rather biased but it really isn't as involved as you suggest (or maybe that should be it can be as involved as you want it to be).

Reply 587

Zoedotdot

toddy21

Just to add a slightly different experience to Crazy_emz's post, I had one of the slave driver DoS's that she talked about and we had weekly supervisions, and by the end of the year had covered 10 texts and four topics. We could absolutely not have done any more, so you definitely won't have to read all of them unless your supervisor is genuinely insane. I did:

Lazarillo de Tormes
Cervantes
El burlador de Sevilla
Fuenteovejuna
La de Bringas
Unamuno
Romancero gitano
Cien anos de soledad
La tía Julia y el escribidor
Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios

And for the topics:

Metafiction
Space, Place and Identity
Desire Limited, Desire Unlimited
Performance and Performativity

I actually started the course not having read anything, because I was planning on taking Sp1 and was asked to change (definitely worth it, this was one of my two favourite papers this year!). I really would recommend reading the three texts that they say you should, and also try to battle through Cervantes (it's a bit obscure and took me ages to read) and definitely watch the film. A girl in my college read all of the texts over the summer and I think that probably helped a bit, because the rest of us had to try to swallow a book, all the critical stuff and write a decent essay between Monday and Sunday, and I especially struggled because I was taking it alongside an ab initio language, for which we have more classes and more work.

Read as much as you can basically - it's not a requirement to read everything, but the more you read the better your Spanish gets, so reading books you don't study isn't exactly going to do you any harm if you do it in your free time. Also, for things like Cien anos, Lazarillo, Cervantes - texts that are written in Golden Age Spanish or are interminably long - don't worry too much if you find you can't read it without recourse to an English version. A guy in my college read all of the texts in English this year: I normally tried to read it in Spanish first but would run out of time or realise I wasn't understanding it and have to finish it in English. These are not easy novels to read, so don't worry if you feel like you have to have a look at the English: obviously do try to read them in Spanish, but to write a good literature essay you do need to know what the main plot actually is, so if you're struggling then English is the way to go. There's a really good parallel text for Lazarillo de Tormes online, if you google it.

Reply 588

Chubasco

Read as much as you can basically - it's not a requirement to read everything, but the more you read the better your Spanish gets, so reading books you don't study isn't exactly going to do you any harm if you do it in your free time. Also, for things like Cien anos, Lazarillo, Cervantes - texts that are written in Golden Age Spanish or are interminably long - don't worry too much if you find you can't read it without recourse to an English version. A guy in my college read all of the texts in English this year: I normally tried to read it in Spanish first but would run out of time or realise I wasn't understanding it and have to finish it in English. These are not easy novels to read, so don't worry if you feel like you have to have a look at the English: obviously do try to read them in Spanish, but to write a good literature essay you do need to know what the main plot actually is, so if you're struggling then English is the way to go. There's a really good parallel text for Lazarillo de Tormes online, if you google it.

Yes, I agree. You'll probably get a rather sternly-worded letter with the reading lists that your DoS sends you telling you that reading texts in English is a BAD THING. Ignore it. Obviously, it's better to read the texts in Spanish but sometimes they're too complicated/you won't have enough time to sit and read Spanish and that's where the English translations come into their own. I mean, even my supervisor was shocked that my supervision partner and I had actually read all of Cien anos de soledad in Spanish - the first thing we did after that supervision was go and buy the English version!

Reply 589

toddy21

Thanx guys for all the advice!!! :smile:

Buying all your books must be pretty pricey!! Do the colleges offer book grants?

Reply 590

toddy21

im going to pembroke :biggrin:

Reply 591

yellowwdaisy

wait- is this just spanish, or do people not read their set texts for most post-a-level languages??

how do people write essays on books they spend just 2 weeks studying if they havent read them before hand???

do people find the french/german texts too hard to read in the original too?

Reply 592

a_man_1066

This has been really useful generally, but can anyone shed some light on whether other languages are similar (and which of the texts are easy/hard etc). I'm especially thinking about French/German here.

Reply 593

Zoedotdot

fumblewomble

Personally I don't agree with people reading in English. I don't see a lot of point in doing the papers if you're not going to tackle the texts in the original. Certainly it is difficult but it is entrely doable if you give yourself enough time. If you really struggle with old language (which you probably will), get yourself a version in modern french/spanish/german etc to read alongside it - that's much better than reading it in English.

That said, there are always people who read in English for all languages. They're often those who have not given themselves enough time to read the text in the original so have to read it in English quickly in order to be able to write their supervision essay. I can't emphasise enough how important it is to read during the vacations in order to avoid this situation. That's why they're called vacations rather than holidays...

And it's less than 2 weeks' study per essay - more like about 4 days to read and write given all the other work you have to do as well.

I do see your point and a year ago I would have agreed with you wholeheartedly, hence my valiant attempts to read all of the texts in the target language. I did actually manage this with my two Russian texts, partly because one didn't have a quality translation, and partly because we simply had far more time to go through them. I personally translated the one without a decent translation, which took a huge amount of time (given that it was a 26 page poem in a language I'd been studying for 8 weeks!).

However, the problem that I found was that a lot of the time I was missing fine nuances in the texts that I did pick up on in English. For the majority of the texts, as I think I said above, I read at least half in Spanish. But when you come to something like Cien anos de soledad, which is so clever and so confusing that even in English I got a bit lost, particularly because the characters all have the same names and things, or La de Bringas, which contains enormous amounts of critical vocab, I don't think it's shameful or should even be frowned upon to have a look at the English text. The paper is, unfortunately, not a comprehension paper, it doesn't examine how well you've read the texts in the foreign language, but your interpretation of the text overall.

I also had issues with timing, but they were purely personal - I was planning on taking Sp1 before I arrived so had read none of the texts and was playing catchup from the start. Furthermore, I was studying an ab initio language - and this may have just been my poor time management - but I know that both of the Russianists in my college found that Russian sucked so much time away from our post A level language. Rather than the four days quoted above, I had two days in my week - Saturday and Sunday - to read the text and write the supervision essay. It is definitely advisable to try not to end up doing that, and I would also recommend reading during the vacations - something that I did do, but again, something that was compromised by the overwhelming amount of Russian work I was set.

What I'm trying to say is that it's not shameful to have to look at the English version of a text. The level of Spanish I had before I came to Cambridge was absolutely atrocious, I felt so far behind the rest of the first years and I don't think I would have been able to read a text like Lazarillo de Tormes before I came up. Reading the texts in Spanish is definitely a big boost to your language skills so do have a go, but it is also important to make sure that you have understood all of the details of the texts so you'll actually know what to talk about in your essays.

Just my take on things. I realise that the way I have managed my time this year hasn't been great, partly because I didn't use my summer (not that I had much time in it to use!) and partly because I devoted too much time to my ab initio, but at the same time my literature papers have been my two strongest, I think because I tried to read most of the texts in the original but also made sure that I actually knew what was going on by reading them in English, something that we were even advised to do in Russian!

Reply 594

Melz0r

About bookshops and purchasing of books - if I ring one of the bookshops on the list Cambridge give and say, "I'm going to Cambridge to do French and German, I need all the books, can you do me a deal mate?" will they say yes? (I suppose the answer to this question is to actually phone them and say this, but I don't want to look stupid).

How did everybody buy their books and when?

Reply 595

Chubasco

Melz0r

I doubt it...but I suppose there's no harm in trying. Let me know if it actually works!

I got sent reading lists in July by my DoS so I just looked around on various websites and ended up buying the books from a mixture of Amazon, Grant and Cutler and Abebooks, depending on where was the cheapest. And, by the way, I'm majorly jealous that the books for Fr2 have changed because your year seem to have done pretty well out of it!

Reply 596

yellowwdaisy

a_man_1066

well I've read most of the 2009 french texts- I didn't personally find any of them particularly difficult to read- the key is to work backwards from most recent to oldest text- that way you get yourself used to the progressively more archaic language. I underlined pretty much all the words I didn't understand in context for future reference, but only looked up the ones which occured frequently, and pencilled them down with a rough translation and rough definition in the back (I just used wordreference/le-dictionnaire.fr). I would personally recommend you make sure you have some grasp of how to read literature in a 'literary' way- just because they are all quite dry, academic texts and you may find them a bit dense if you don't know where they're comming from.

I don't see any reason why you should have to read any in english- they aren't all that long- just give yourself sufficient time to read them as fumblewomble said, and resist the urge to look up every second word in the dictionary (I find this difficult with german).

if you get to phedre and find the rhyming verse impossible to get past/ make sense of, I recommend reading some other french poetry like Baudelaire, which uses the Alexandrine, just because it helps you familiarise yourself and appreciate better the power of the meter

I havent started on the german texts yet- I imagine they'll be harder, because what makes old french manageable is that its latinate

Reply 597

yellowwdaisy

Melz0r

I tried all the websites I knew for my french texts- but its vital you buy the specific editions, which they tend not to have, especially where the older, obscure texts are concerned- if you can get to london, Grant and Cutlers should have all of the texts in the right editions- just maybe ring up and check they have them in stock (and ask them to hold copies for you) before you go. you will probably be able to sell of a good deal of your texts at the end of each academic year to blackwells second hand section and recuperate some of the money (as long as you keep them in decent condition), but I don't think they do any special cambridge deals- you could always ask about student discounts.

Reply 598

Duck and Cover

Just for people's information, at the last Faculty board meeting they said that it wasn't vital to buy the specific editions, and from experience there isn't really a reason to have the same ones. The only time it's best is with obscure texts like Pascal's 'Pensées', so that everyone's numberings are the same. However, if you can get the one they recommend, then of course do! But if for example there is a particular edition which you can't get hold of, then an alternative edition would of course be ok!

And in terms of reading texts in English, I think the 1st year is the most important year to read the texts in the target language, as you really do need that useful intro to reading foreign texts. I don't mean that in the following years you SHOULD read the texts in English, but obviously if you're studying several texts by the same author it may be best just to speed through an English edition just for some background knowledge.

Reply 599

renaissancemensch

Phedre happens to be showing at the National Theatre (in English, naturally), and I suppose that, too, would be a worthy pursuit in preparation to studying it...
Just a thought.