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Should German learn more English?
QUESTION:Maybe you hit upon a generation gap. I once met a girl from Finland,
who was studying here. She complained that, once people noticed that
she was a foreigner, they would switch to English, which was a pain to
her, as she came here to speak German and her German was better than
her English.
There have been changes in teaching English in Germany. When I started
learning English, the English book would contain stories about Beowulf
and Grendel and William the Conqueror, now they really concentrate on
real world colloquial English and modern texts.
So to what generation do the people you are complaining about belong?
ANSWER: It sure pisses me off that most times when I do have to make business
with German companies, there are several difficulties on the way and
this always is a result because of lacking abilities for speaking and
understanding English language by the German people I do business with.
If you want to do business in Germany, it is _your_ job to learn German, not
the German's to learn either English or Finnish. The reason (one anyway)
Germany became such a great commercial power in the 19th century with such
limited resources was that the Germans went out and learned English, Finnish,
Chinese, Swahili, etc, while the English and French just spoke to themselves.
See biography of Heinrich Schliemann (the Troy excavator). For the same
reason, America is now being eclipsed commercially by the Japanese.
I understand that if I grab mr Nobody on the street he most probably is
not an English virtuoso. But that these same people are working for
companies that are involved in international trade?
It is really frustrating when you know that your message does not get
understood because the other people lack BASIC SKILLS in understanding
and speaking. You know, simple sentences with no commas, any numbers
longer than 2 numbers, basic pronounciation. I know simple German so I
can understand when they switch over to German vocabulary, but God, if I
didn't?
Is there something wrong with the teaching of English language
Germanwide, or is it just the attitude? I feel very many germans feel so
self-sufficient with their own country plus the German speaking abroad
that English is not praised very much. Is it partially because films and
tv series are dubbed? I strongly doubt it, because this way our standard
German citizen never gets to hear enough English to form a habit for
listening to it.
In my business things always run quite smoothly whomever with we
operate, but the trouble is always and mostly with Germany. It is no
surprise that we don't buy very much from Germany anymore, because the
level of frustration and misunderstandings is greater than the few extra
percents that goods cost for example in Netherlands, or at the
manufacturing countries like Taiwan.
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