Why learn German – the 10 critically overlooked reasons (2024)

Switch to the German version of the article here: Warum Deutsch lernen?

Why learn German? That is the question.

Or like some students like to ask, is German a good language to learn?

Well, there are multiple benefits of learning German, and here are 3 examples stories to start with…

James was a mechanic in Mexico City.

He used to earn about 12000 pesos per month, running the daily drudgery of fixing broken cars.

Learning German exposed him to a new job in a German company based in Cancun where he now earns more than twice as much as he previously did.

For Charity, learning German enabled her to obtain a scholarship and now she is studying product design in Frankfurt.

And Roberto is living his dream of playing football in the German league, in which he began by learning German.

Still not sure why you should learn German?

That’s a bit of a conflict, isn’t it?

So let me help you out:

The first of the 10 reasons to learn German has to do with getting a well-paying job.

But because the term well-paying job by itself is just vague, let’s make it practical using the table below:

…not bad for a pay day, huh?

You can find out how much you would earn as a teacher, cook, accountant, driver or any other profession by checking out the average salary in Germany.

Let me also tell you that if you come to work here in Germany and you obtain the EU blue card, you can stay for a much longer period than if you were using the normal travel visa.

While that sounds exciting, one of the requirements is that you should be somewhat of a scientist and have a lot of work experience up your sleeve to get the EU blue card.

So why don’t you just learn German for the respect?

If you think German is hard, it’s probably because you probably came across an endless parade of long German words, German umlauts:ö, ü, ä or a funny character that looks like it was borrowed from the Greek alphabet (ß).

In reality, however, the German that you need to get along with daily conversations is not hard at all.

Have a look below:

If you can read this text then German will be easy for you to learn, but don’t worry why some words use the article ‘die’ while others use ‘der’.

If you’d however like to check them out, here is an explanation of the German articles: DER, DIE and DAS so they don’t confuse you again.

One thing to note is that when you learn basic German, these articles will be much simpler to understand than why the word ‘fish’ doesn’t change in its plural to ‘fishes‘.

In addition, 26% of German vocabulary has shared roots with English, and I have compiled over 50 examples of the similarities between German and English so that you can see how closely related they are.

Onto the next one…

One student once asked me, I want to be smarter. Should I learn German?

Of course the conversation was much longer, but this is the thing…

The German language structure needs you to hold certain verbs until the end of a sentence before you use them, which improves your spatial ability as well as memory.

In fact one of the reasons why Germans are so mechanical comes down to the anatomy and word structure of the language.

Consider this:

Rüdiger Gamm, world famous human calculator could calculate math up to the power of 15 in his head when thinking in English, but this increased up to power 23 when he was thinking in German!

In terms of achievements, 77 Nobel prizesin the fields of physical sciences, chemical sciences and medicine have been awarded to winners from German speaking countries

And in the arts, some of the greatest music composers in history such as Beethoven, Bach, Mozart and Chopin spoke German.

So now we come full circle and back to my student’s question – is German useful to learn if you want to be smarter?

Sure.

And if you’d like to test that, then you cancheck out this Free German Course and learn German 6x faster than by using other methods.

This shows that you could have a supplementary income if you could translate German texts to other languages or translate text in your language to German.

Either way it’s a win for you.

From a great business idea being copied to a cup of coffee being spilled, something happens every 20 minutes depending on which country you are talking about.

In Germany, that thing is the formation of a start-up.

The start-up scene is so robust that this is what I came up with when I did an analysis of start-ups in various cities in Germany:

Again, more opportunity for you if you would learn to speak German.

One of the major reasons to learn German has to do with the fact that college education in Germany is free, and you can easily join one from anywhere in the world.

This is despite the fact that most developed countries that offer good education are either expensive to live in or charge more fees to students from other countries.

In Germany, public universities do not charge for tuition, and the cost of living is also much lower than in other countries.

For example, the cost of renting an apartment in London, Dublin, Paris, Geneva and Oslo is about twice that in Berlin.

Here is a quick comparison to show you what I mean:

Obviously, there are many factors that determine the pricing of houses, but Germany is generally much cheaper to live in and the parties here are crazy.

What more would a student ask for?

You are not going to be a student forever.

Which means that the more equipped you are for your professional life the higher your chances of success.

In this regard, German is a useful language to learn because Germany is the largest European trading partner with the U.S. and German companies account for over 700,000 jobs in the U.S. alone!

Additionally, despite Japan itself being a strong economy,68% of Japanese students still learn German.

That’s because German is the fourth language for business in the world.

Imagine this:

You are a Japanese tech wizard who comes across a job opening by an EV company in Germany looking for qualified software engineers.

You send your application where you state that you can speak German too.

What are the chances that you’d be considered more than other international applicants who don’t speak German?

The point is that as long as you can speak German and you’re good at what you do, German companies across the world will be friendly and will want to have you in their team!

Which brings us to the next point:

Sometimes I happen to have my students ask me, why should I learn German when my German friends can speak English?

Well, in this case you don’t have to, but obviously, you will get more embraced by the people of any country if you can speak their language.

For instance, when my Danish friend came visiting and I spoke to her in Danish, she was very impressed!

In contrast, my trip to Japan was not half as interactive as it would have been because very few people spoke English as you got deeper into the country.

I really wish I could understand those charming smiling fellows but language got in the way!

When it comes to German, don’t be that guy! At least know these basic German phrases.

You may also want to check these 7 cool ways to say hallo in German or even how to say my name is in German

German is an official language in Germany, Liechtenstein, Austria, Switzerland, Luxembourg and Belgium, and also a minority language in Poland, Hungary, Denmark, Czech Republic and Romania.

It’s also the most widely spoken language in Europe after English.

Is learning German useful for more than landing jobs and travelling to Europe?

Sure!

You see, when you study a foreign language you improve your memory, problem-solving skills and cognitive reasoning.

It even delays the onset of brain degenerating complications such as dementia, which means you will keep your memory well into old age and keep speaking German.

I could go on and on but for the sake of the princely ‘top 10 reasons’, I will stop there.

You have already seen many reasons why to learn German, and even if you do not intend to travel to Germany, opportunity might just find you where you are.

Remember, luck is what happens when opportunity meets preparedness.

All that remains now is for you to get up, get down, turn right around and learn some schneezy-weezy German!

Click to try out my Free German Course and Learn 6X Faster!