<p>To write/film about issues besides local/national/international news, such as the environment, does one need a degree that involves that subject, or is it more open?</p>
<p>tghe second best language is ebonics and tyler healy language combined —you can get a degree in Healonics at BPort</p>
<p>First learn spanish.</p>
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<p>Why is she learning farsi if she is going to Dubai? Not sure how much farsi is going to help. Honestly, if she is going to Dubai, she is better off learning Hindi/Arabic. Infact, if she speaks Hindi, she is all set since the Arabs there speak hindi too :p</p>
<p>Cornell has a Chinese major that incorporates both a semester in China and another semester in Washington studying China policy.</p>
<p>IMO…</p>
<ol>
<li>Chinese</li>
<li>Arabic</li>
<li>Spanish</li>
<li>Japanese</li>
<li>French</li>
</ol>
<p>Nowadays, I’d say Arabic is probably the best choice if you want to get an edge as a journalist. On one hand, very few Americans can actually speak Arabic, much less read or write it. On the other hand, the demand for journalists who know Arabic is very high as a result of continuing coverage of Middle East affairs by US-based news organizations. If the law of supply and demand still holds, one must conclude then that an Arabic-speaking US correspondent will be worth a lot in the job market. </p>
<p>In the long run though, I’d say Mandarin Chinese is another very interesting option. China is the world’s fastest growing economy and is likely to overtake the US as the world’s largest economy in the next 20 years or so. Moreover, China is already one of America’s top trading partners and a military power in its own right. Interest in Chinese affairs is only likely to grow in the future and, accordingly, there will be a growing demand for Mandarin-speaking journalists as American news organizations increase their coverage of the emerging East Asian superpower. </p>
<p>Of course, you could also choose instead one of the traditional European languages, like French or Spanish, which are premanently in demand. The problem is however that, although demand for French or Spanish-speaking journalists is constantly high, the existing supply in the market is also high, since those languages are widely taught in American schools and universities and, being European languages relatively close to English, they are comparatively much easier to learn and master than non-European languages like Arabic or Chinese.</p>
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<p>All modern Romance languages are equally difficult (or easy) as far as grammar is concerned. Morphologically, they are actually very similar: they all have two genders (masculine and feminine) and two numbers (singular and plural) for nouns, gender and number agreement, no morphological case marking, and more or less the same verb tenses, including fully developed indicative/subjunctive and perfect/imperfect distinctions. Spanish syntax is however somewhat more complex than that of French (less rigid word order, null subjects, etc.) . French and Portuguese are more difficult to pronounce though than Italian or Spanish, essentially because the former have more vowels than the latter. In addition to being easier to pronounce, Italian and Spanish also have a largely phonemic and, thus, very easy spelling. French spelling in turn, like English BTW, is far more difficult. Portuguese spelling is somewhat in the middle: it’s largely phonemic like in Spanish and Italian, but it has more special exceptions than the latter. </p>
<p>As for Mandarin Chinese, it is obviously much more difficult to learn for the simple reason that it is completely unrelated to English and has a completely different vocabulary as well as a completely different grammatical and phonological structure. The main difficulty though is that Chinese also uses a different (and inefficient, one may argue primitive ?) writing system. If Chinese used an alphabetic writing system instead (as it was once considered at the time of the communist revolution), learning it would be considerably easier (and literacy within China would improve dramatically).</p>