Why we should learn German

Thanks for sharing the article. German is my mother language - and I came to appreciate it as a beautiful language. It has not the natural beauty of Italian, it is more how you can go from sounding harsh to sounding soft, where you not only change your voice but also the kind words you say. You can make it sound and feel like the worst of all Nazi movies or as romantic as a Beethoven piano serenade.

By the way, I think it is a language for men. Women have a tendency to sound too harsh with it. In contrast, egyptian/syrian Arabic or Farsi tend to let you fall in love with the women who speak it, yet men speak it to harsh (Arabic) or often strangely funny sounding (Farsi). Few languages are nice to hear whichever gender it speaks (French comes to my mind, of course its all a personal taste).

I really like German for its expressivity. I would not say it is more expressive than English, but differently. There are many things that are easy to say in German but very hard in other languages, and vice versa.

"Schadenfreude" is well-known, but one word I wanted to use often in recent times is "Missgunst" or "missgönnen": When you don't want somebody to have something. It's not jealousy, it is resenting somebody for their fortune. Google translate offers "resentment", but it doesn't fit perfectly, as that can also mean you just hold a grudge towards somebody. "Missgönnen" is the opposite of "gönnen", which means to be generous, to grant something, to be happy for somebody's fortune.

I am Dutch, we seem to have some feeling for languages (small country and when I was young, the television would have BBC (English), ZDF (German), BRT (Flemmish) some French channels and really bad Dutch tv), I speak 6 languages including German fluent enough to make jokes and I am trying to learn #7, Mandarin, which is indeed quite hard when you get older. Of the languages I interact with, I find Flemmish, German & Mandarin the most pleasant to listen to. It is always a pleasure when the plane enters CN airspace and the soothing sounds of that language come up, while, on the other hand, German triggers my analytical senses. German sentences (especially from writers like Boll) somehow seem more provocative for the brain than my mother tongue. Flemmish has that too for me, but it needs to be well written and that is not that common, still when it is (Lampo for instance), it is a feast.

There is a deep fallacy in his argument. The academic learning of a language teaches almost nothing. The true challenge is not foreign vocabulary it is the reluctance to engage another culture, which is the prerequisite to learning any language. The author does not make this distinction possibly because he was stationed in a German-speaking country and assumes each language learner can mimic his learning process without his experience.

Often, one won't even attempt to learn a language unless you appreciate - or at least think you appreciate - the culture.

“I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men, and German to my horse.” — Charles V

>> J.Le Carre: "And I discovered that the language fitted me. It fitted my tongue. It pleased my Nordic ear."

After learning several european languages, I once went to Romania, and enjoyed how nice romanian sounds. I was always thinking why we perceive some languages sound nice and some others not. How languages are perceived depend on the backgrounds of speaker and listener, on the context we're in, on which part of the mouth they are spoken and on the pitch level etc. So a good test is to see the languages spoken by a beautiful seductive person, during dispute, during business negotiation, in pop culture, during manly talks full of testosterone, in the mouths of immigrants and lower classes.While I worked in Germany, a test I was making was to ask someone from a non-neighbor, remote country like Cambodia how German/French or Spanish sounds. At the end all languages sound nice in some context.

Interesting how some people find the sound of German natural. I find German sounds extremely difficult to pronounce with all these consonants next to each other.

English is not the easiest to pronounce either but it seems easier than German. Dutch sounds like a clearer version of German but with a funny 'g' sound.

Italian is so clean and simple, even if you don't speak it, you can probably tell each word apart.

French is pretty clear and easy to pronounce, I rarely ever ask people to repeat themselves in French. It uses a broad sound spectrum with lots of open-mouth sounds (lots of vowels and vowel combinations which produce new sounds).

It's very easy to start muttering in English because you barely need to open your mouth to speak it.

"Rather than join the chorus of anti-German propaganda, he preferred, doggedly, to inspire his little class with the beauty of the language, and of its literature and culture."

That was in 1940. In 2017 those languages would be farsi, russian and chinese i guess?

I came for the linguistics and left disappointed for the end devoted to politics. There's a point to it, I suppose.

It's probably very presumptuous to compare myself to the writer, but for me it's kind of the other way round.

My native tongue is German (but I grew up speaking Bavarian first, which is clearly German but not just pronounced differently, there are also some grammatical peculiarities...) but I started to learn English pretty early - and all things considered I much more prefer English to German. I've never lived abroad and spoken it daily for more than 3 weeks (unless you count the internet) - but going into programming it's the lingua franca, I don't think I've read even 10 German books about programming or computer science. Still, if I'm not talking daily (like with coworkers who don't speak German) my use gets rusty and faltering and so I wouldn't call myself absolutely fluent when being honest and not just padding a resume :P

Still, I prefer the sound of English, I like many more English dialects than German ones, and even puns are easier to craft ;)

But overall I wouldn't advise anyone to not learn German, at least if you like hard work, pain and humiliation.

I think to some extent linguistic relativity might be a thing. Linguistic relativity is the idea that language affects your world perspective.

Some languages such as Spanish and French encode a lot of irrelevant information compared to English. e.g: objects like chairs and computers have a gender, words tend to be longer, verb conjugation is more complex... and that eventually translates into more cognitive load.

I really wish I had the patience to read this, but the title is just too damn boring and I see no all-inclusive reason to learn German outside of a German speaking country.

If anyone could TLDR, I would appreciate, but at the same time you shouldn't encourage my sloth.

As a side note, as a German I could not help but chuckle about John le Carré smuggling this into the essay:

    Every time I hear a British politician utter the fatal words, “Let me be very clear”, these days I reach for my revolver.

which is a reference to a (most likely misattributed) quote by Hermann Göring, "When I hear the word culture, I reach for my revolver" (or ".. my Browning").

> To help make the European debate decent and civilised, it is now more important than ever to value the skills of the linguist

Personally I think the German establishment is just trying to conquer Europe again, as much respect as I have für die Deutschen und ihre Sprache. Today, Britain needs no additional sympathy for Germany, they need sympathy for themselves, a will to live. The EU is unrepresentative, unproductive, and unaccountable. Nobody needs any more reverence for it. The EU is the worst French idea the Germans ever took to.

Germany is today a country where foreign journalists are chased through the street by communist activists, and where you need a license to post a video on YouTube. If your teacher's beloved Germany ever returned, it is surely leaving yet again. I talk to Germans who are fleeing to Austria, because they feel something wicked coming, and I don't blame them.

Britons could stand to learn from Germany's mistakes and be more honest with themselves before it's too late for anyone to be honest with anyone.

DAS BOOT!! I remember talking to a colleague about this movie at a former job, and a woman near me piped: "Who would want to watch a movie about a Boot?!" We were speechless and she was totally serious.

The "real" Germany is back? The author must not have been there in a while.

Mr. King sounds like inspiration for some part of George Smiley's character.

It's disturbing how many guardian articles we seem to be getting lately here. I left reddit to escape these types of articles.

Also, it's pointless to learn german - especially if you know english as english is already a germanic language.

What we ( I'm referring to americans ) should learn is LATIN and ANCIENT GREEK as they are truly "foreign" languages that had such a strong influence on english and western civilization.

I studied Latin and Greek independently AFTER I graduated college and it's shocking to me how useful it would have been during my academic career. Not only would it help you understand the english language better, it helps with the understanding of western civilization and of course expands your vocabulary immensely since so many of english words ( especially technical/scientific ) is derived from these two "dead" languages.