Chinese OR Russian

I want to study politics/IR with a language. I’m torn between Chinese or Russian.

I know both will be very difficult, but I’m determined to make the most of having a language in my degree.

Any advice on how useful either language would be in the future is highly appreciated. I’d love to work in civil service, or maybe military intelligence.

While Russian seems very topical at the moment, I’m unsure whether Chinese could offer more opportunities for me to work abroad in places like Australia.

Like I said, any feedback is appreciated.

Reply 1

artful_lounger

Universities Forum Helper

What is your language learning background like? Do you have any experience of east Asian languages? Normally east Asian languages are taught intensively as sole subjects, I question how high a level of language ability you could attain in a joint honours in that subject.

Russian, while having a lot of grammar and being potentially complex, is fundamentally still an Indo-European language and so shares a number of features with other European languages and may have some cognates with English and other European languages which could help. It also might make it easier to pick up outside of an intensive course. This would be even more true if you have any background in other Slavic languages (e.g. Polish or something).

Personally I think I'd not choose to study an east Asian language unless I was doing a degree solely in that subject where the uni had a long history of teaching the language and taught it intensively from the start, to ensure I had more than just a basic ability in the language by the end.

Spoiler

Reply 2

HollyMGreening

Thank you very much! This was really helpful :biggrin:

Reply 3

artful_lounger

Universities Forum Helper

Original post by HollyMGreening

Thank you very much! This was really helpful :biggrin:

I would note though, that in a single honours degree in a language you do study more than just the language and you will usually study the history, literature, politics and other social science topics of the country/countries speaking the target language.

I imagine most Chinese degrees have ample options in modern Chinese international relations and politics, so if you did want to focus on China you would still be able to angle your interests towards that at most unis I expect (some more than others perhaps; I think Cambridge and Oxford are a little more literature/history heavy, although Oxford does have a fair range of modern China options too I think, you would just do a lot of Chinese literature and classical Chinese as well). So that is something to consider too :smile:

Also you could quite easily do a masters in international relations/politics after a languages degree - I know someone who did an undergraduate in Japanese and is now (or perhaps has finished by now?) doing a masters in international relations!