I've been living in Berlin for about seventeen years. My German isn't great but usable in an emergency. I get by with it. Most work related stuff is English.
Bureaucracy is an annoyance in this country. But the flip side is that if you persist, you'll manage. It's also not something that's necessarily a lot better in other big countries. But Germany could do a lot better by just moving a lot of the key processes online, cutting down on asking for the same information over and over again via paper forms, and speeding up decision processes. That's slowly happening.
With AI translations, doing things in German (or any language) is a lot easier these days for foreigners. Also making sense of the complex processes with AI is helpful. Insistence that everybody should learn German is understandable from a nationalistic point of view. But you get quite far without that. Easier than ever now. Germany could be a bit more accommodating for this.
And the reality in factories, on construction sites, etc. is that you hear a lot of other languages being spoken. Lots of eastern Europeans active in the construction industry, for example. And lots of nurses and doctors from abroad are active in their hospitals. Packages are being delivered by people from India and Pakistan. And of course German companies that sell to foreign companies have to deal with the notion that their customers mostly won't be speaking German. Germany is already a lot more international than it might like to admit.
But it's undeniably true that you need to speak German in order to interact with especially older Germans and their companies. They simply don't speak anything else. Kind of weird because many of them are super dependent on import/export markets and yet they are mortally afraid of having to be in a meeting with non German speakers. I've experienced this several times. However, the baby boom generation is retiring and younger generations are already much more internationally focused. Most younger college educated people here speak English at this point. It's not that much of a problem as it used to be.
And even talking to people is getting easier now that we have AI translations and transcriptions. I've worked my way through a few meetings in Denglish. Ugly, but it works and if you have a shared business goal, people get more flexible.
Germany has been in and out of a recession for several years now and it's working population is on track to shrink and things like its pension and healthcare system are becoming a problem financially. It will need to work smarter to get out of that and that probably is going to require working with people that won't be speaking German from outside of Germany. Easy fix for that recession is just embracing the future. Many of Germany's problems are of its own making and very fixable.
Bureaucracy is an annoyance in this country. But the flip side is that if you persist, you'll manage. It's also not something that's necessarily a lot better in other big countries. But Germany could do a lot better by just moving a lot of the key processes online, cutting down on asking for the same information over and over again via paper forms, and speeding up decision processes. That's slowly happening.
With AI translations, doing things in German (or any language) is a lot easier these days for foreigners. Also making sense of the complex processes with AI is helpful. Insistence that everybody should learn German is understandable from a nationalistic point of view. But you get quite far without that. Easier than ever now. Germany could be a bit more accommodating for this.
And the reality in factories, on construction sites, etc. is that you hear a lot of other languages being spoken. Lots of eastern Europeans active in the construction industry, for example. And lots of nurses and doctors from abroad are active in their hospitals. Packages are being delivered by people from India and Pakistan. And of course German companies that sell to foreign companies have to deal with the notion that their customers mostly won't be speaking German. Germany is already a lot more international than it might like to admit.
But it's undeniably true that you need to speak German in order to interact with especially older Germans and their companies. They simply don't speak anything else. Kind of weird because many of them are super dependent on import/export markets and yet they are mortally afraid of having to be in a meeting with non German speakers. I've experienced this several times. However, the baby boom generation is retiring and younger generations are already much more internationally focused. Most younger college educated people here speak English at this point. It's not that much of a problem as it used to be.
And even talking to people is getting easier now that we have AI translations and transcriptions. I've worked my way through a few meetings in Denglish. Ugly, but it works and if you have a shared business goal, people get more flexible.
Germany has been in and out of a recession for several years now and it's working population is on track to shrink and things like its pension and healthcare system are becoming a problem financially. It will need to work smarter to get out of that and that probably is going to require working with people that won't be speaking German from outside of Germany. Easy fix for that recession is just embracing the future. Many of Germany's problems are of its own making and very fixable.