Foreign Languages
Young professionals learn German
Learning European languages may no longer have much cachet among schoolchildren, but for millennials eyeing the job market, German appears to be more attractive than ever. Growing numbers of young adults aged between 18 and 30 in Britain are learning the language of Friedrich Schiller, Christa Wolf and Thomas Mann, according to the Goethe-institut, with more than 3,000 people signing up for courses run by the cultural institution. In 2018, about the same number of students took a German A level — the highest school-leaving exam in Britain — a 16 per cent drop compared with 2017. This has caused angst among education professionals, who are concerned that Britain is sliding further into monolingualism as it prepares for a future outside the European Union. Research by the British Council shows that 34,300 students took A levels in French, German or Spanish in 1997, compared with 19,200 in 2018 and just 17,505 applications in 2019.
Yet there is some optimism on the part of Angela Kaya, the director of the Goethe-institut in London. “We see at the moment a decline of our European students, who maybe aren’t coming to the UK at the moment because they don’t know what Brexit will bring,” Kaya said. “But we are seeing an increase of British students who might think they haven’t learned German as a foreign language so far and it makes sense to do it now, as a young professional. They are mostly aged between 18 or 19 to about 30.”
Understanding the culture
Learning a foreign language doesn’t just open doors to communicating with others; it also helps people understand the world better, Kaya said. Untranslatable words such as the German Gemütlichkeit, Hindi jugaad, Danish hygge or Portuguese sobremesa require an understanding of the culture they come from, and machine translation has many potential pitfalls. It was reported that people using Google Translate to turn a construction sign’s message — “blasting in progress” — into Welsh were given “gweithwyr yn ffrwydro”, which means “workers exploding”. Julia Gross, the chargé d’affaires at the German embassy in London, said the fall in the number of British pupils doing German at A level was disappointing and might not bode well for their future educational and professional options. “This year’s further decline in the number of A-level students studying modern European languages, and German in particular, is both saddening and troubling,” Gross said. “German is not just a smart choice for a multitude of career paths, [it] also opens doors to German universities, which are very popular, not least because they do not charge tuition fees.”
Last year, the writer John le Carré extolled the joys of learning German in a speech published in The Observer. He said: “You’ve probably heard the Mark Twain gag: ‘Some German words are so long they have a perspective’. You can make up crazy adjectives like my-recently-by-my-parents-thrown-outof-the-windowplaystation.”
Le Carré added: “And when you’re tired of floundering with nouns and participles strung together in a compound, you can turn for relief to the pristine poems of a Hölderlin, or a Goethe, or a Heine, and remind yourself that the German language can attain heights of simplicity and beauty that make it, for many of us, a language of the gods.”
“German is not just a smart career choice, it also opens doors to German universities”