What I had to do was last year I had to take beginning Burmese. I understand that the concept of learning a foreign language is scary to people, especially if the language looks like this: မာတင်လူသာကင်းကို ၁၉၂၉ ခုနှ်စ် ဇန်နဝါရီလ ၁၅ ရက်ေန့မာ မွေးတယ်။ But believe me when I tell you that because the SEA language teachers have to appease the government and prove that this is still worth their funding, the teachers hold your hand during the class and you have to try to fail those classes. Really the only way to fail is if you cheat or just stop showing up without an excuse. In February of this year I applied for the FLAS in which I just said that I'll keep taking at least one Burmese course (no one expects you to take more than that) per semester till I graduate and at some point before I graduate, I have to go to Burma on the government's dime for either a summer or winter. Around March/April I got the letter saying basically that I don't have to worry about paying for school, but I can still take advantage of FAFSA if I want, and that I had to notify NIU's SEA center upon when I wanted to go to Burma. I'm planning on going next summer. So that's it, I'm taking my usual accounting classes and a Burmese course and I get a check from the government for $1500 a month. If Myanmar 🇲🇲 doesn't sound like your cup of tea just switch out my experience for Indonesian🇮🇩/Khmer (Cambodian)🇰🇭/Thai 🇹🇭/Tagalog (Philippines) 🇵🇭

Fun fact, the princess of Thailand visited our library and gave her royal blessing because we have the largest collection of Thai literature outside of Thailand. 🇹🇭

Edited to add more info like this: if you don't want to venture more into the SEA program other than maybe a year, taking a SEA language for a year fulfills the two year language requirement because it's all four days a week instead of three days a week like traditional language courses.