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Globally speaking, German is useless, unless you're European and trying to find a job in Germany because it pays better than your home country. The only German
by yosito 4y ago
Globally speaking, German is useless, unless you're European and trying to find a job in Germany because it pays better than your home country. The only German speaking country is full of educated people who also speak fluent English. You'll never meet an internationally minded German who doesn't speak excellent English. Spanish, however, is spoken in an entire continent, which also has a very low level of English, plus several other countries and is closely related to other latin/romance languages, giving you a head start on learning/understanding those.
Chinese/Mandarin might be super useful if you're living in China or a nearby country, but a) why would you want to live in China if you're not Chinese? And b) the language of international business in China is still English.
- wheels 4y agoI agree that German isn't especially useful globally, but you're wrong on a couple points: - There are several countries with German as an official language, and a few other with German-speaking minorities. Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Lichtenstein, Luxembourg and Belgium all have it as an official language (though the last few are not terribly significant). There are also around half a million native German speakers in Italy. It's also useful as approximately the root language of Germanic languages, and makes it faster to pick up e.g. Dutch and to a lesser extent the Scandinavian languages. - All internationally minded Germans do not speak English. Large swaths of Germans speak no, or only basic travelers' English. That everyone speaks English in Germany is an illusion that English speakers experience in Germany because they largely mix with only one social class, and the non-English speakers are invisible to them. (I'm a native English speaker and fluent German speaker who's lived in the US and Germany for equal amounts of my life. My girlfriend, for example, is not comfortable in English, nor are quite a few of my friends, particularly those that are blue collar, somewhat older, or from the east.)
- tick_tock_tick 4y ago> All internationally minded Germans do not speak English. That means they aren't internationally minded then.
- wheels 4y agoYeah, you're totally right. Angele Merkel was definitely not internationally minded. (She does not speak English well, nor did her foreign minister.) It's also a pretty terrible thing to assume that everyone who wasn't born into the upper class isn't internationally minded. Again, my girlfriend doesn't speak English well because she's from a working class family from the east, but she's been to a couple dozen countries, and manages a team of people from several countries.
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- yosito 4y agoGood point about the other German speaking countries. I don't really know why that slipped my mind. But the social class thing you mentioned is kind of my point. I think it's pretty much true in all of those German speaking countries, that if you only want to interact with service workers in cities and professional, college educated, internationally minded people, you will have plenty of people to talk to and might not ever feel a need to know German.
- wheels 4y agoAgain, Angele Merkel is a pretty convincing counterexample.
- yosito 4y agoI'll keep that in mind when I'm trying to socialize with the likes of Angele Merkel
- wheels 4y agoYeah, probably the chancellor and foreign minister were the only two from their generation that were educated, internationally minded and don't speak English.
- eru 4y agoHuh? What makes you think they don't speak English? Angela Merkel can definitely speak English.
- wheels 4y agoHer English is pretty bad. The commenter I was replying to insisted all internationally minded Germans speak excellent English. That's false for Angele Merkel and Guido Westerwelle, and it's literally impossible to find more high profile counterexamples.
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- fnord77 4y agoEveryone says learn Mandarin but actually I'd rather learn Cantonese than Mandarin. It's the 3rd most spoken language in the US
- eru 4y agoYou can learn Cantonese for fun, but Mandarin is more useful for business or travel. > It's the 3rd most spoken language in the US That's interesting, but why would that influence your decision which language to learn? Almost all the Cantonese speakers in the US probably speak English, and there aren't that many in the grand scheme of things? (Especially compared to total number of Mandarin speakers.)