I failed German O Level the first time I took it. I think we all did - the whole class. And that includes someone who went on to study German at Cambridge.
Our teacher, nearing retirement, had decided to adopt a new and untried way of teaching. By the time of the exam we could recite by heart a long passage about two soldiers during the Second World War, but we couldn't either translate it or do anything else. We were saved, in the first term of the sixth form, by a brilliant new teacher who got almost all of us through the resit exam in November of our first year sixth - and we then asked to continue being taught by him alongside our A levels, although we were not doing any further exams in German.
I have always been grateful to that teacher - for it is through him that I have become one of that small minority of people from the UK (a 2012 Eurobarometer Survey put it at 6%) who have the ability to have a simple conversation in German. German is certainly not my best foreign language (without a doubt that would be French), but it also illustrates the law of comparative advantage. That law states that it is better to do what you have the greatest advantage over other people in, rather than what you are best in. Throughout my academic career I have been amongst a significant number of UK social scientists who speak French - but I believe that for some years I was the only UK geographer who spoke German. Actually, I never exploited that as much as perhaps I should, although I did produce some research papers on Vienna and Berlin and had a research project with a German colleague comparing Japanese communities in Düsseldorf and London. I also organised a couple of British-German seminars to bring students and researchers together from the two countries - and at one of them found myself having to give a speech in praise of the chef's cooking.
German is the mother tongue that is most spoken in Europe west of Russia, far more so than English. Add Austrians and Swiss Germans in to the population of Germany and around 90 million Europeans speak German at home. The figure for English is around 70 million. Shortly after the Iron Curtain fell in 1989 it looked as if German might vie with English as the lingua franca for the continent as a whole. I was at a migration conference in Vienna in the early 1990s where the official language was English but where a whole range of new colleagues from Eastern Europe, attending their first major international gathering, found it much easier to use German. But the moment passed and English has become even more dominant.
The Eurobarometer survey I quoted earlier suggested that in contrast to the 6% of UK citizens who can hold a conversation in German, 56% of German citizens could chat to someone in English. I am currently in south-west Germany - on the edge of the Black Forest - and those figures seem a little surprising to me. My experience over the last couple of weeks has been that a much higher proportion of Germans, even in occupations where they are likely to come into contact with foreign visitors, are monolingual than the data suggests. The waitress in my present 4 star hotel, widely advertised in foreign guides; the train conductor on a tourist train; shopkeepers - none of these seemed to have any language other than German.
But tourist arrival statistics provide some reasons for this. World Bank data show that, despite its size, Germany receives only about one third as many foreign tourists each year as France - the world's premier foreign tourist destination - and is way behind Italy and Spain as well, and on a par with the UK. Many of those tourist arrivals in Germany are from the Netherlands, simply passing through, and another significant group are from Switzerland and are German-speaking. And by far the biggest tourist region in Germany is Bavaria - which I have not been visiting. Finally, a lot of Germans holiday within their own country.
Badenweiler, where I am writing this, is a small spa town with no real equivalent in the UK. The Romans knew the waters here, and there are superb remains of their bath house, wonderfully displayed. There are big hotels for those 'taking the cure', and a beautiful and well-managed park around an old castle which has views stretching across the Rhine into Alsace. Chechov, dying of tuberculosis, came here but it was too late and he died here in 1904. Below the town there are vineyards with paths that invite a morning or evening stroll. All told it's a very German setting - and none the worse for that.
So I am enjoying being in parts of Germany that are surprisingly monolingual, and I am grateful to that teacher for enabling me to function here. But there is one interesting contrast between my monolingual hotel here and establishments of a similar level in the UK: in the latter a variety of languages are these days spoken - by the foreign staff they have to hire to overcome the shortages of trained British employees.
Our teacher, nearing retirement, had decided to adopt a new and untried way of teaching. By the time of the exam we could recite by heart a long passage about two soldiers during the Second World War, but we couldn't either translate it or do anything else. We were saved, in the first term of the sixth form, by a brilliant new teacher who got almost all of us through the resit exam in November of our first year sixth - and we then asked to continue being taught by him alongside our A levels, although we were not doing any further exams in German.
I have always been grateful to that teacher - for it is through him that I have become one of that small minority of people from the UK (a 2012 Eurobarometer Survey put it at 6%) who have the ability to have a simple conversation in German. German is certainly not my best foreign language (without a doubt that would be French), but it also illustrates the law of comparative advantage. That law states that it is better to do what you have the greatest advantage over other people in, rather than what you are best in. Throughout my academic career I have been amongst a significant number of UK social scientists who speak French - but I believe that for some years I was the only UK geographer who spoke German. Actually, I never exploited that as much as perhaps I should, although I did produce some research papers on Vienna and Berlin and had a research project with a German colleague comparing Japanese communities in Düsseldorf and London. I also organised a couple of British-German seminars to bring students and researchers together from the two countries - and at one of them found myself having to give a speech in praise of the chef's cooking.
German is the mother tongue that is most spoken in Europe west of Russia, far more so than English. Add Austrians and Swiss Germans in to the population of Germany and around 90 million Europeans speak German at home. The figure for English is around 70 million. Shortly after the Iron Curtain fell in 1989 it looked as if German might vie with English as the lingua franca for the continent as a whole. I was at a migration conference in Vienna in the early 1990s where the official language was English but where a whole range of new colleagues from Eastern Europe, attending their first major international gathering, found it much easier to use German. But the moment passed and English has become even more dominant.
The Eurobarometer survey I quoted earlier suggested that in contrast to the 6% of UK citizens who can hold a conversation in German, 56% of German citizens could chat to someone in English. I am currently in south-west Germany - on the edge of the Black Forest - and those figures seem a little surprising to me. My experience over the last couple of weeks has been that a much higher proportion of Germans, even in occupations where they are likely to come into contact with foreign visitors, are monolingual than the data suggests. The waitress in my present 4 star hotel, widely advertised in foreign guides; the train conductor on a tourist train; shopkeepers - none of these seemed to have any language other than German.
But tourist arrival statistics provide some reasons for this. World Bank data show that, despite its size, Germany receives only about one third as many foreign tourists each year as France - the world's premier foreign tourist destination - and is way behind Italy and Spain as well, and on a par with the UK. Many of those tourist arrivals in Germany are from the Netherlands, simply passing through, and another significant group are from Switzerland and are German-speaking. And by far the biggest tourist region in Germany is Bavaria - which I have not been visiting. Finally, a lot of Germans holiday within their own country.
Badenweiler, where I am writing this, is a small spa town with no real equivalent in the UK. The Romans knew the waters here, and there are superb remains of their bath house, wonderfully displayed. There are big hotels for those 'taking the cure', and a beautiful and well-managed park around an old castle which has views stretching across the Rhine into Alsace. Chechov, dying of tuberculosis, came here but it was too late and he died here in 1904. Below the town there are vineyards with paths that invite a morning or evening stroll. All told it's a very German setting - and none the worse for that.
So I am enjoying being in parts of Germany that are surprisingly monolingual, and I am grateful to that teacher for enabling me to function here. But there is one interesting contrast between my monolingual hotel here and establishments of a similar level in the UK: in the latter a variety of languages are these days spoken - by the foreign staff they have to hire to overcome the shortages of trained British employees.
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