hello everyone and welcome back to my channel if you're new here
my name is sarah and i study modern languages at
university whilst most people i know study either
french or spanish one of those two at least i study
german and italian been studying german for about 10 years now first in school
and now in university and i always get questions about like
sarah why do you learn german when there's so many more useful languages to
learn and yeah like what is the point if
you're putting all that effort into learning a language german
is so hard right you can just learn french or spanish which are apparently a
bit easier for english speakers to learn another common thing that i've been told
and which i kind of get is that all germans speak
english anyway so in this video i just wanted to
analyse these arguments and see how valid these really are and
actually really say yes there is a point in learning german
there is just so much reason to learn german so yeah if you're thinking of
learning german yourself and you want to maybe try and convince either yourself
or others that you do have reason in learning german i
just hope that you find this video useful german is
actually the most widely spoken language in the eu
think about this right even before brexit it was the most widely spoken
language so whilst there's like 60 million people
in the uk and you've got ireland as well but
ireland isn't really that populated but with germany you've got 80 million
people we've got austria and switzerland as well
loads and loads of people speak german there and a few german speakers in italy
and luxembourg and belgium it's no surprise that german is the most
widely spoken language in the eu and when you take europe as a
geographical region and you've got russia
russian is the language which has the most native speakers in the whole of
europe second to that is german i'm going to
talk more about why this is so important later
and why even though so many german speakers do learn
english why it's still important that more people do actually bother to learn
german even if german isn't their native tongue
so just to put some figures on this german has
95 million native speakers that's almost 100 million guys
and 10 to 15 million people learn it as a second language
and 75 to 100 million people learn german as a foreign language so
you know you've got over 200 million people
who speak german in the whole world that is a lot right
and ever since the enlargement of the european union
in the early to late 2000s and going into now
the balance between french and german has been changing so
whilst a lot of people before this enlargement
learn french as a foreign language a lot more people are now competent in german
than in french with this new expansion so it
means that you've got more people to communicate
with because to put some figures on this again
i will read off my screen just to like make sure that i'm saying the right
thing but i'll put it also below if you want to check out the
source it says here that's 23% of people in the new member states of
the european union have competence in german whereas before this expansion
people in the other states only 12 percent of them had competence in
german in the eu 15 whereas people in the new um member
states of the eu aren't as competent in spanish and
french only one percent of them know spanish
and three percent of them know french so it just kind of shows really that
german is still a very very common language to learn
even if it's not your native language and adding that to
the amount of the hundred million people or so who do have german as a native
language it's just so worth learning because yeah not all of these
people necessarily speak english you know and
there's more people to communicate with so yeah if you
want to get a job in europe which is international and involves a lot of
dialogue or communication or whatever between member states in europe then
it's a no-brainer that german is the language to learn if you
already know english moving aside from the sheer amount of
people who speak german whether that's as a second language a native language
or as a foreign language germany itself
just germany alone let alone like other countries where germany's spoken germany
has the fourth largest economy in the world okay and it's got the
largest economy in the eu and obviously money shouldn't be your
sole motivation but germany is a huge economic powerhouse
you might also say that most germans speak english anyway
but as we've already established german is a huge
priority as a foreign language in the new eu member states and also
i just want to say something that might surprise some of you
but i mean like i know that when i go on holiday
in germany or like probably in my year abroad
to start off with anyway if they can tell that german isn't my native tongue
they will probably start speaking english to me but
one thing which i have learned in my year abroad is that if you're speaking a
foreign language all day it's just so so so mentally draining
if it's not your native language so if you sort of put yourselves in the
shoes of the german people who are speaking english to you it's gonna take
them so much more mental effort even if they
are really really good at english to speak to you in english than
if they just spoke to you in german so if you learn german then you are
putting the burden of them by speaking to them in their native
language if you know what i mean i don't know if i'm making sense but like
yeah i just feel as though it's polite to
learn the language or at least learn some phrases of the language of the
country that you're in and it's definitely important to learn the
language of the country you're in if you're staying there long term you
know also i just think that it's very very very entitled to think that
everyone is going to speak english to you all the time
even if there's like in an office environment for example in a german
office even though probably everyone in that
office would speak english if it's like a professional firm then if if you come
along and you like think that you can get a job
there without learning german then you're probably wrong because they're
not going to speak english just for you it's it's a cultural thing you know like
it's even though they can speak english they
wouldn't speak english just for you because
like we're in germany okay like people speak german
more than any other language so yeah i hope that i'm making sense here but
um yeah i just think that it's very rude if you think that people are going to
speak english to you all the time there's this quote which i am trying to
remember right now and it's something like
if you speak to someone in english then they understand you but if you speak to
them in their native language then you're speaking to their hearts
something like that i'll try and get that quote but
i just think that that really speaks volumes because you can just get so much
more out of the person if you speak to them
in native language like they open up so much more and you can like really have
that connection that you wouldn't have if you just spoke to them in english all
the time i guess that this can apply to every
language pretty much like every person who doesn't speak
english as their native language but i think that this is particularly
important to remember with german considering that yes so many people who
speak german also speak english but that doesn't necessarily mean that you
should just like not even consider learning their language
and also once again if you do want to live in a german-speaking country
especially austria switzerland and germany you will need to
negotiate bureaucracy in german it's very unlikely that they would translate
everything into english just for you if that makes sense so
things like rental contracts insurance opening a bank account all the terms and
conditions you have to read they will most likely all be in german
if you're in a german speaking country if you don't want to
like pay loads and loads of money to hire someone
to translate everything for you you should probably learn german if
you're going to live that right anyway and also this is just a more general
point i guess but languages offer a window into the
cultures of where they are spoken so germany
has an amazing history we're only taught like a tiny tiny snippet of it at school
and like i understand why we're taught this certain
period of german history it's very extremely important there's just so much
more that we do not learn in school about germany and the whole of
the german-speaking world like we only learn about germany i've never learned
about austria really or switzerland or liechtenstein or belgium or
luxembourg in the same way so if you learn german then there's more
chance that you will be able to sort of really connect
with the history of the Deutschsprachigen Raum
or like the german speaking world in a way that you would never have been able
to at school it's just really hard to sort of
articulate this put it into words but you just get so
much more out of a culture out of experiencing a culture if you
know the language as well you just can't experience it in the same
way if you don't know the language so in order to do justice learning about
any cultures where the german language is spoken
you need to learn german and lastly because german is so difficult it is a
very satisfying language to learn once you master it it's just so so
satisfying i don't think i have mastered it yet but i can already see
that i have come a long way and german is just ideal if you want a challenge
because yes italian is great but it's not quite
sort of at that level of challenge if you know what i mean
i still find italian difficult don't get me wrong but
it doesn't have things like three genders and
prepositions which change the case of the nand it's all really really crazy
and when you first learn german you're like
what is this i'm probably making zero sense if you don't know german but
i hope that anyone who does know german can follow me on this in conclusion
learn german next time someone says to you
life is too short to learn german then perhaps you can tell them some of these
reasons why actually learning german is worth it
i hope that yeah i've maybe convinced you if you have had any doubts about
learning german please if you do have the opportunity to
learn german than do because it's just so rewarding
and why wouldn't you want to learn a language where you wear
'Hausschuhe' around the house instead of slippers
and where those animals that sleep in trees all the time are called 'Faultiers'
instead of sloths you know what i'm saying if you've made
it this far in the video then i would absolutely love it if you subscribe if
you haven't done already and give this a thumbs up because
i do make quite a few videos on learning german
and i am moving to germany hopefully cover permitting in april next year to
study in berlin so i will definitely be documenting my year
aboard in germany even more i'm currently in italy
if you want more videos like this then please stay tuned and i will see you in
another video very soon, bye!