All students who intend to continue study of a language at Florida State University in which they have had previous experience (such as high school study or study abroad) must be placed into the appropriate course by the Department of Modern Languages. Students in French, German, and who continue with the same language must take the placement test before they enroll in a course in the department. Students in other languages must consult the department for the appropriate placement procedures before enrolling.

The Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics at Florida State University offers Spanish students a variety of electronic language learning systems and language media resources. It has a fully equipped computer lab where students may work on their language skills under an instructor's guidance, as well as a walk-in computer lab which they may use at their convenience. The department develops and maintains the Virtual Language Lab, an online language resource site which offers students a wide variety of electronic media resources for the languages taught by the department. The department's video collection has over two hundred foreign films.

In addition to the academic, cognitive, and social benefits to learning another language, there are unique benefits to learning Spanish. For example, consider the following facts:

• Spanish is the official language of 21 countries, and there are more than 400 million native speakers of Spanish, more than any other language in the world except for Mandarin Chinese.
• Spanish has never been a ?foreign language? in the United States. In fact, in the present day states of Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas, and FLORIDA, Spanish was spoken for nearly a century before the first English-speaking settlers arrived in Virginia and Massachusetts.
• The United States has the second largest Spanish-speaking population in the world (after Mexico and ahead of Spain, Colombia, and Argentina).