Talk your way out of recession
Statistics point to an increase in interest in learning German, now that the latter is showing its economic and political muscle in Europe.
This week the newspaper Tagesspiegel carried an article reporting that the Goethe Institute’s language classes are booming, with increases of 35 percent in Spain, 20 percent in Portugal, 14 percent in Italy, and even 10 percent in Greece.
No coincidence, then, that these are the countries most endangered by the parlous state of their economies; it seems even the Greeks, who have been busy burning effigies of Angela Merkel, are contemplating the reality of working for German masters, either at home or abroad, in the re-shaped Europe of the future.
In this country the Daily Mail, picking up the subject, suggests that the increase in Greeks learning German is as high as 20 percent, with young and pragmatic professionals determined to make themselves more employable. The newspaper doesn’t, however, turn its searchlight of truth upon the dismal language-learning record in the UK.
Languages in British schools have long been on the decline. Research by the British Academy shows that A Level German was the second biggest casualty (after French) with a 44 percent decline between 1996 and 2007. Spanish briefly bucked the trend in recent years, but according to the latest statistics from British universities, the number of students signing up for European languages is down by 11 percent in the 2012 intake, with those interested in German dropping by a whopping 23 percent. Not surprisingly, as many as a third of university language departments have closed in the last seven years.
It seems that we’re on our own little island, doing our own thing, as usual.
And yet my own experience of German is that it is a far more accessible language than many. Unlike French (or even English), it is written pretty much as it sounds, and once you get used to the idea of the verb at the end, its grammar is not so hard. Institutions like the CBI and the Chamber of Commerce are united in their opinion that language is one of the key foundations of trade, and thereby of growth. So buck up you Brits. Go and hammer on the doors of the Goethe Institute. Let’s sprechen our way out of this recession.
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Yes, yes and yes! I learnt French for about 5 years, yet understood more German in the first year of studying it.
It’s ridiculous that the government has made languages not compulsory past 14 and the statistics above show exactly the impact. Having done German to degree level I’ve found it to be very beneficial. The Year Abroad was worth going to university alone, plus now I am learning Mandarin and despite it being a very different language, I can use the skills I had when learning German and apply them further.
Saying that, my prospects might be brighter with less language students…! But we need to bring languages back as compulsory, and show the benefits in the working world, skills-wise.
“English speakers do not need to learn foreign languages – everyone speaks English!”
I come across this constantly, and not only in the pages of the Daily Mail, by people who claim to have a good working knowledge of more than one other European language, but also among other UK-based tour operators at the Germany Travel Mart. I once got into a heated arguement with a group of them on just this theme. I am truly amazed at how few tour operators working with the German (and Austrian) market speak more than a few words of German. The amazement is only reinforced by the initial surprise of many of my German contacts when they discover that I am quite content to speak to them in their own country using their own langauge.
I am not sure about the grammar being that easy though. True, until a year before I went there, my secondary school taught French only to the more able and German to the less able, but they also said that that only worked up to ‘O’ Level. Beyond that stage, the situation reversed. Indeed, when I attended a German evening class in Switzerland, a Czech classmate was almost reduced to tears by what he saw as the utter illogicality of the way German makes use of prepositions. The teacher attempted to console him by telling him how lucky he was that he was not learning English. And she was right – think about it!