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<p>Emphasis on last phrase: no good for you as a journalist. Don’t waste time on a “foundational” dead language.</p>
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<p>This person’s point is crucial, though this should not be “another” approach for you. You should do this anyway. Economics a must. Poli sci very important. A specialization if you want to specialize: regional, scientific, business, etc. Journalism is competitive.</p>
<p>As regards language, here are some things to consider:</p>
<p>Most Commonly Spoken Languages
Rank Language Number of Speakers
1 Chinese (Mandarin) 1,000,000,000 +
2 English 508,000,000
3 Hindustani (Hindi and Urdu) 497,000,000
4 Spanish 392,000,000
5 Russian 277,000,000
6 Arabic 246,000,000
7 Bengali 211,000,000
8 Portuguese 191,000,000
9 Malay-Indonesian 159,000,000
10 French 129,000,000 </p>
<p>I think it’s better to look at the following list, which derives from the named rating factors:</p>
<p>After weighing six factors (number of primary speakers, number of secondary speakers, number and population of countries where used, number of major fields using the language internationally, economic power of countries using the languages, and socio-literary prestige), Weber compiled the following list of the world’s ten most influential languages:
(number of points given in parentheses)</p>
<p>English (37)
French (23)
Spanish (20)
Russian (16)
Arabic (14)
Chinese (13)
German (12)
Japanese (10)
Portuguese (10)
Hindi/Urdu (9) </p>
<p>Beyond English, you have to make some judgement calls, IMO. If you want to do journalism, what stories/regions do you want to cover? Terrorism/Middle East/Oil? Learn Arabic. Africa? Learn French. Economies? Learn Chinese or Hindi or even Portuguese.</p>
<p>Remember that learning Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, and perhaps Russian (I don’t know about Hindi) will require sometimes much more effort than learning one of the simpler European languages. E.g., they say you can learn 4 europeans in the time it takes to learn Chinese.</p>
<p>In terms of difficulty of learning, here’s how teachers rated the following languages. The higher the number, the more difficult the language.</p>
<p>French 2.4 Spanish 1.45 Italian 2.73 German 4.00 Russian 6.1 Chinese 8.64 Japanese 8.18 Latin 3.18 Ancient Greek 6.2 Hebrew 7.4 Arabic 7.91 </p>
<p>Though it’s rated as being easier here, I have personally heard that Japanese is harder than Chinese from a person who mastered both (at Berkeley, Harvard, and in Asia). I found the following analysis on the web:</p>
<p>Quote:
What is the most difficult language to learn?
Richard Brecht
Deputy Director, National Foreign Language Center</p>
<p>Japanese is without question the most daunting language for a native English speaker to tackle, according to Brecht. “I would like to learn Japanese but I don’t have enough time in my lifetime. That’s very depressing,” says the linguist, whose center is based at Hopkins’s Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). He notes that the State Department allows its students three times as long to learn Japanese as it does languages like Spanish or French.</p>
<p>As Brecht explains it, the challenge with Japanese is threefold. First, there’s the fact that the Japanese written code is different from the spoken code. “Therefore, you can’t learn to speak the language by learning to read it,” and vice versa. What’s more, there are three different writing systems to master. The kanji system uses characters borrowed from Chinese. Users need to learn 10,000 to 15,000 of these characters through rote memorization; there are no mnemonic devices to help. Written Japanese also makes use of two syllabary systems: kata-kana for loan words and emphasis, and hira-gana for spelling suffixes and grammatical particles.</p>
<p>Get beyond that and you’re faced with a culture that, says Brecht, is “truly foreign for most Americans.” With many languages, students start by learning introductions (Comment-allez vous? Trs bien, merci, et vous?) “But with Japanese, you can’t even begin to do that with lesson one because of the social distinctions involved in making introductions,” says Brecht. Age, social status, gender–“all these sociological factors make it so complicated that introductions can’t be the first lesson,” he notes.</p>
<p>Finally, there’s the issue of grammar. In English syntax, grammar is right branching. We set a topic and then comment upon it: “I saw the man who was sitting on the red chair, which was sitting beside the door.” Japanese syntax is left branching-- “totally contrary to our approach,” says Brecht. Thus, the sentence above becomes something along the lines of: “I saw the red, which was the chair, which was…” You get the idea. </p>
<p>Good luck. For me, it really boiled down to be about the ladies. As superficial as that sounds, it’s the truth. I tend to like women from romance language-based cultures. Though it wasn’t ultimately my cup of tea, my male friends who learned Chinese and stuck with it (I basically gave up after a few years only because I didn’t want to stay in Asia) did so because they liked the ladies – and then it became a good career choice for them as well. With me, I started on Chinese for career, but ended on Portuguese for love – or for something a bit more visceral and sometimes related to love.</p>
<p>If you are going to learn a language, consider a few things: more difficult languages will make you a rarer commodity. The most important thing, though, is to choose a region you would like to live in and commit yourself to, if you are going to make the investment in learning the language. I am fascinated by Arab countries, but the time I have spent in them has led me to believe I would hate living in one over time. I learned Chinese for practical reasons, but at the end of the day, I am really happy I don’t live in China. However, I have close friends that are very happy there and a couple are as successful as journalists as it is possible to be.</p>
<p>Good luck.</p>
<p>NOTE: Much of the above is from a different thread, cut and paste.</p>