Why Should I Learn German?

1. German is easy to acquire

Let’s start off by debunking the myth that German is especially hard. Despite all the jokes that are being made about it being an impossible language, if you are an English speaker, you are actually already quite advantaged.

This is because German and English share the same Germanic root. Consequently, there are many thousands of words which are closely related known as “cognates.” For example, the English chin is Kinn in German. Water becomes Wasser and father turns into Vater. Not so hard after all, is it?

Furthermore, unlike Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian, or Arabic, there is no new alphabet to learn, only a few letters to add. If you already know Latin script (and if you do not, I am incredibly amazed you have been following the article this far) the only new arrivals will be the umlauts ä, ö and ü as well as ß which is just a fancy German s.

And that’s not all. There are more . It’s really not the time sink that so many people make it out to be. You just have to learn how to study smart rather than study hard.

2. German is the language of inventors and innovators

It is said that Germany is the country of poets and thinkers – Das Land der Dichter und Denker. There is definitely no denying the second part. A large percentage of the world’s most impressive achievements were first conceived of in German.

Over one hundred Nobel Prizes have gone to brilliant Germans for accomplishments in physics, medicine, chemistry, literature and other areas. That is not even counting the prizes awarded to people from the other two major German-speaking countries Austria and Switzerland. Plus, many of the recipients from other nations received their training at German universities.

So if you are looking to add a Nobel Prize to your resume, learning German might not be a bad place to start. Perhaps you have slightly lower goals, and are just looking to absorb some of this genius by reading famous publications in their native language.

3. German is an important language in academia

With that big a number of award-winning scientists from its home country, it might not come as a surprise that German is very important in the academic community. In fact, it ranks second as the most commonly used scientific language.

One of the reasons for this is that the German book market is the third largest in the world, right after the Chinese and English publishing industries. Since the percentage of these books that are being translated into other languages is fairly limited, only a knowledge of German will give you access to them.