Your passport to the world

I have often asked myself - Why learn German? To the uninitiated, it sounds aggressive, harsh, and even scary! In all honesty, the language of Goethe struggles to compete with the sexiness of French or the musicality of Spanish. Yet those who speak it say the language has such precision of expression it becomes poetry in motion. As the language of the leading philosophers it is also a language that is capable of expressing states of mind, subtle emotional or rational conditions and even personal traits that other languages have difficulties describing. The word Schadenfreude – laughing at someone else’s pain - is a word that can not be found in other languages. Today, many of those unique German words have found their way into English and they are gradually creeping into the Spanish speaking world with creations such as Zeitgeist, Götterdämmerung or Wanderlust. 

If anything, we are all discovering that in the current economic crisis those who speak German often have better professional and economic prospects. So what are the reasons for this?

Germany has the third largest economy in the world and it is the economic powerhouse of the European Union thus providing ample business and employment opportunities. Don´t be fooled, German is the most widely spoken language in Europe. More people speak German as their native tongue than any other language in Europe and it is the 3rd most taught foreign language. The Japanese, who have the 2nd most powerful economy in the world, understand the business advantages of this and today 68% of Japanese students take German lessons.

If you're looking for employment in the United States, knowing German can give you the edge. German companies account for 700,000 jobs in the United States, and all other things being equal, the job candidate with German skills will easily trump the one without such skills. If you are a student, you know that German is required or recommended by many undergraduate and graduate programs and it will come as no surprise to know that Germany financially sponsors over 60,000 international student exchanges a year.

German presence on the Internet accounts for 8 million Internet domains. Germany's top-level country domain .de is second only to the extension .com. To top it all off 1 in 10 books in the world is published in German.

Finally, German is not as hard as you think and it opens up a whole new world of thinking for you. If you speak English, then you already have an advantage when it comes to learning German as the two languages share similarities in both vocabulary and grammar. If you understand any of this ... “Meine Schwester hat braunes Haar. Sie ist intelligent. Sie studiert Medizin in Berlin. Sie kann gut singen”.... then you already know some German!

Study German at espanglish visit our website at www.espanglish.net. Contact us at info@espanglish.net or call 950.39.00.37 and 950.38.28.76