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Language Degree Dilemma

Hello, (this is quite a long post but I would be extremely grateful if you read it all)

Today has been a rather bad day. I received my AS level results today and things did not go very well. I know I need to retake things to get the grades I can really achieve but that is not my dilemma.
One of the a levels I chose was French. Now, when I chose French in year 8 as a GCSE, I thought I enjoyed it a lot more than German but I chose to pick up German as a hobby and I discovered whilst I was finishing my French GCSE that I was a lot better at German and I enjoyed it a lot more.
I realised that I wanted to do German at university along with politics not too long ago. However, I received a U today for my French grade. Two other people in my class also got Us, one person got an E and another managed to scrape a C grade. I think the department at my school has had some issues because we have had various teachers but I do also mostly blame myself.
After receiving this result, I felt extremely disheartened and I have decided to drop French as I do not think I can cope with it.
The only issue with me dropping French is that it seems to be a requirement of a lot of Russell group universities that I must do French or German at A level in order to do a beginners German course.
I am feeling very upset as I really wanted to become a translator in the EU but that seems like nothing more than a hollow dream for me now :frown:

. Does anyone know of any good universities that don't require this or can I impress universities by giving them proof that I am capable of doing German?
Any suggestions and help would be great. I will be booking an appointment with the careers adviser when I go back to school but in the mean time I would like to see if anyone had any ideas.
Thank you if you managed to read all of this. I greatly appreciate it.

Reply 1

AGT95

Firstly, I'm not trying to rain on your parade, but usually to be a translator or interpreter for the big institutions, namely the UN or the EU, you are requirement to have more than one other language. Now, I believe there are exceptions if you're a translator (exceptions, which I'm not entirely up-to-date with unfortunately), but it's worth having that borne in mind throughout.

Secondly, if your aim is to do a degree in German from scratch (Ab Initio) as the main subject of your degree, then there are few courses in the UK which would facilitate that. I believe UCL allow you to do a straight German BA from beginners, but the grades required from your A-Levels for that degree will be in the AAA-AAB range I should think, but take a look by all means. Usually, if German were to be the major of your degree, you would have to have taken it to A-Level, or at least AS level. It is entirely possible, although it will take some research and potentially some ringing of the universities to double check, to take a degree with a major of, say, Politics, then to do Ab Initio German as a minor, and I believe there are many options to do that. The caveat to this would be that they usually require a language, doesn't matter which, to A2 level, although this isn't the same everywhere and some only require a GCSE in a language to a specific grade.

Just hunt around and start using the UCAS Course Search tool to look for degrees. When I was applying for my degree, we were more than welcome to email the admissions or languages department of the universities to ask questions such as this. If your desire really is to go on and be a translator or interpreter, it may be worth looking at other languages as well because the more, the better when it comes to a job like that.

I hope this helps in some way. I took both French and Spanish to A-Level and I understand how difficult they can be.