Hi all,
At the end of next year I plan to start my honors thesis in history. There's a semester of skill building, a summer of research, and then a semester of writing. I'm not confident about my topic yet, but I know it will be (early) modern intellectual history, and most likely Jewish histoy. As of right now I know English and Hebrew. I'm considering taking two semesters of accelerated German (equivalent to four semesters) before I start my thesis. I feel like, especially for modern Jewish history, German is an essential language. Besides the widespread use of German amongst many thinkers and historical figures, much of academia was written and discussed in German.
The question I'm struggling with is, is this worth it? I suppose the question is two fold:
Any advice would be much appreciated.
Is 2 semesters of accelerated German (or 4 semesters of regular German) enough experience to read documents and conduct historical research?
It depends on how well you take to the language. Probably it will at least make it so that you can read some primary sources. But it depends on the source. Academic and more formal German prose is notoriously difficult, so if you need to read German philosophic texts you'll probably have trouble.
Is the value I'd gain from two semesters of accelerated German greater than the 3-4 history classes I could take instead.
It depends on your goals. If you want to go on to grad school to study this subject, having German will be important for your application. If you're interested in the language and want to stick with it, possibly work with Germans/in Germany, it would be useful. If you're not planning on those things, and value more the boost in critical thinking, exposure to new areas of history, and opportunity to write more papers that you'll get from two more history courses, then you may be better served by the two history classes.
Do you intend to go to graduate school, and to keep pursuing this topic? If the answer's yes, you'll need German in the end, and the sooner you start the better.
One of the things that makes history graduate degrees take so much longer than other fields is the time it takes to master the languages we need to use for our research. As a result, language preparedness is a major factor in grad school admissions; most programs can't afford to fund students years while they learn languages, and prefer to admit students who already have a lot of experience and can get up to speed with a couple of year's focused study.
So if you plan to continue studying this topic after you're done with undergrad, you want to start German now. It could make the difference between getting into a funded PhD program (ideal) and having to pay for your masters out of pocket (not ideal).
If, however, you plan to leave academia for good when you graduate and don't have a plan for how you'll keep using your German in your post-academic life, I don't think you'll get much payoff from learning the language. A year of intensive study will allow you start reading, but you'll get rusty very quickly as soon as you stop using it. You might have more lasting benefit from taking more history classes (or, say, a few classes in anthro or archaeology) instead.
In my opinion, German is an extremely useful language. At the institutions at which I have studied, I took classes called "German for Reading", which were aimed at graduate students who wanted to be able to read German texts, but who didn't need to be fluent. Therefore, you are mostly concentrating on understanding and parsing the grammar, and vocabulary is not as important, since you have access to dictionaries and online resources (the same as you would if you were studying a text on your own outside of class). Check to see if your university has a class like this, as it will be more useful than a typical class would be (where you are focused on conversation and speaking and expressing yourself in the language). I was able to work my way through academic articles written in German at the end of a single semester. It came in handy in graduate school when I needed to read a German book on Anatolian neolithic architecture for a paper I was writing.
I am all in favor of adding languages to your tool belt. If you are intending to go to graduate school (as /u/butter_milk said), you will need to know German anyway, and having a head start and being able to use it would be very good.
That said, if you aren't planning on using it much after your thesis, it might be better for you to do the history classes you mentioned, and be steeped in some of the other skills and thought processes and analytical strategies necessary for historians.
In the long term learning German will be way better and more helpful in your studies than some history courses. So if you want to work in this field in the future I'd advice you to learn German.
Now 2 semesters will be fairly close. It can be that you will be able to read a fair amount, but it also could be that your understanding would be minimal. It is fairly hard to predict this, but two semester is the very bare minimum I'd say.