你好！大家好.
So I wanted to ask, does anyone here have a degree in Chinese language/culture? How did you go about getting it, has it served you, and what was the best way to approach paying for it?
I absolutely love languages but I A) don’t have any “extra money” to invest, and B) can’t decide if it would be worth it/which language I would choose to focus on…any thoughts would be awesome!
你好最近還好嗎
I don’t have a degree but I’ll share my thoughts on your question.
As far as any degree serving you, that is really up to you. When it comes to fields like law, medicine or finance, the path is pretty clear cut so how it serves people after graduating is pretty clear. Languages on the other hand are still a worthy degree to pursue although the rewards are less obvious. The obvious careers would be translator and or teacher. The thing is though, you can always get creative and create your own rewards. Perhaps you start and business and import products from China, or maybe you start your own language school and train people on language acquisition. I would say that a language major is probably best paired with some type of technical skill and then you look very good to potential employers. For example maybe you code and speak chinese, or maybe your an accountant and gain more clients for being able to communicate with the chinese community in your area.
The worst result would be spending 4 years in school and still insufficient when it came to applying the language, which I heard happens often with people who major in certain languages.
As far as paying for it all goes, I would say its going to be a lot of hard work. Part time/ full-time work while pursuing your degree. Or you take some loans and go so hard with your studies you end up getting mad scholarships. I have a friend who was profiting while in school, but son had a 3.9 gpa and was majoring in engineering.
All that being said, nowadays, school is so expensive that its not really a great investment, financially speaking, unless your becoming a doctor or lawyer (and I even heard the law field is over saturated).
Speaking of doctors, one thing thats really cool if you get your bachelors in chinese is you can go and major in chinese medicine in china or taiwan. After thats finished you will be a Master of Chinese Medicine (on paper, real mastery of chinese medicine takes a lifetime of actual practicing chinese medicine in the field). Then you can go back to america or whatever country and practice acupuncture and herbal medicine. Or you can stay in Asia and practice medicine there. I heard in Korea, tcm doctors make quite a good living. If your mandarin is college level by the time you finish your degree you can go to school in china pretty cheap because the schools typically charge less for the classes if they’re in chinese instead of english (you can also study tcm in china in english, but it costs more and isn’t as official as learning it in chinese, you need to speak and read high level chinese to actually be any good at tcm).
That was quite a bit of rambling that somewhat answers your question. Take what I say with a grain of salt tho, I never attended any college and probably never will, as college won’t bring me to my end game plan, which is to be a billionaire. No “job” will you pay you that much.
拜拜 
谢谢！这是很有用的。你的主意太好了。很容易说的，难做的啊，对不对！我想试试在找一个路给我意思的。I don’t think those sentences have proper placement of verbs/adjectives but I hope it makes a little sense! Thanks for the input! I love acupuncture and Chinese herbs and had not thought of Korea as a potential job market by any means, so thank you for the suggestion!
不會 不會
我看得懂 我覺得你打字非常好
我也相信我們可以實現我們的夢想
有的人去大學有的人自己學的
谢谢你！ 我同意了。谢谢提醒我。我每天都练习，总是接着希望的。(I don’t think that is the right order of characters! I struggle so much with character order! Still trying!)