This is part 1 of 4 in my series on Ausländer Pov – Life in Germany, where I express my thoughts on the different aspects of living in Germany for seven years that may help newcomers or just be a fun read for anyone who has gone through a similar journey as I have.

I intentionally chose topics that are important to me, and not necessarily what most newcomers would care about. But there are enough resources to navigate those on the internet.

Click the links below for the next articles in this series. If there’s no link, I haven’t finished writing it yet.

  • Ausländer PoV: Life In Germany – Navigating loneliness and finding your people
  • Ausländer PoV: Life In Germany – Giving back to the community and finding meaning
  • Ausländer PoV: Life In Germany – Being intentional in your life choices

A huge part of the motivation for this series came from a blogpost I read on a similar topic that Freddy shared: https://wickedchicken.github.io/post/programmer-in-berlin-language/

Do you even need German?

Often, I would hear people around me say that living in a metropolitan city like Berlin, you don’t *need* to know German. For the most part, that matches my experience. Sure, you’ll face hiccups here and there, but depending on how high you place the word “need” in the word strength hierarchy, it isn’t as necessary as food, shelter, or even needed to form meaningful social connections.

In a city like Berlin, it is just as easy to find your circle that’s exclusively comprising English speakers, at least in the demographic of immigrants who work in startups and IT companies. I’m very guilty of that. Like many people I know who arrived in Germany straight for work, my social circle ended up being the people I spent the most time at work with, who also happened to be immigrants from various parts of the world and worked a similar job as me. It was comfortable, and for a very long time, I stayed in this bubble that I originally landed in. In this bubble, you’d be forgiven for thinking you’d never need to learn any German living in Germany, and depending on your lifestyle, you’d even be right.

It was only once I started venturing out of this social bubble that I realized that the lack of being able to speak German conversationally was a shortcoming. It takes a few uncomfortable social situations where you’re as good as non-existent in a conversation to internalize this realization.

Disadvantages of learning German

Let me be clear: This article is to try to convince everyone reading this to pick up basic language skills of the place they’ve decided to call home. But I’d do a bad job of sharing this view of mine if I don’t speak of the friction and hiccups you’re likely to experience along the way, as I did.

Time commitments – Learning a new language is a huge sacrifice of your personal time. Time that you can really use for something else, like making more money, friends, finding a new job, renewing your visa, filing your taxes, or traveling to a new place. I can keep going on.

Often, people think of learning the language as a zero-cost activity. Like you land at the Berlin airport and you get to tick a checkbox that says, “Install German language 🧠” and you refuse to check that checkbox because reasons.

After spending months of my life, four evenings every week toiling through my German lessons, on top of a full day of work and other regular life activities that mustn’t stop, I should be clear that it isn’t a zero-cost activity. This is especially useful to remember if you’re being shamed for not learning the language.

Money commitments – Just as with time, learning a new language costs money. In a country like Germany, where labor costs are high, language lessons don’t come cheap. For someone who has arrived in a new place, savings might already be scarce, and all of us would likely spend those few hundred euros every month on something other than a language course or tutor.

I’ve spent thousands of euros trying to learn German. That, along with the time investment, makes it a very expensive endeavor.

Being on the intermediate speaker plateau – Well, at least after spending a non-trivial amount of your time and money learning the language, it will be very rewarding. Right?

Wrong. Once you move past the very basic levels and know enough of the language to be able to form meaningful sentences and retort back, you’ll realize that that’s still not enough to speak comfortably with native speakers.

I’ll spare you the many memes, but long story short, even after having invested many months of my life learning German, I still stumble upon the most basic of words that I don’t know the meaning of, or want to form basic sentences that I cannot. To be fair, I don’t practice or use German daily or have anyone I have an exclusive-German-relationship with, so YMMV. But the important bit to remember is that just because you took the classes or passed your B2 exam doesn’t mean you’re conversational.

(non-obvious) Advantages of still learning German

Naturally, but boringly, this is what this article is about. To not make you and my future self sleep while reading this, I’m going to skip past the obvious reasons people learn the language of the place they’ve migrated to. Instead, I’m going to push my brain to think of tiny little things that I positively perceive, that are a direct result of being able to understand some German.

Pronouncing proper nouns correctly: Not very surprisingly, the names of people, streets, and places in Germany have a different pronunciation in German than in English. Saying someone’s or something’s name the right way is not just correct; it is also the respectful thing to do.

Understand public announcements on the streets: Also, unsurprisingly, a lot of announcements in public spaces happen in German. Many of them are, to different degrees, important announcements. Some can be bridged with technology, like public transportation disruption. Others, like the police, instruct you to do something on the streets, not so much.

Bragging rights – Just like being able to play a musical instrument or cook a good meal, there’s no shortcut to learning a language. For that reason alone, when you can do it to any degree, it shows an investment of effort and commitment. It is something most non-native German speakers I know are proud of. Being able to navigate your way through a German-only encounter is very rewarding too.

Help others – In the section on “disadvantages of learning German”, I wrote about how it is a privilege to have the time and resources to put into learning German, just like it takes a lot of privilege to not learn it (for different reasons, of course). Over the years, I’ve had my fair share of experiences where I could help other immigrants on how to best approach the integration part of their immigration, which often includes learning the language.

Talk to drunk people at the bar – Since it has happened multiple times, I’ve enjoyed my encounters with curious older folks who’d engage me in fun conversations. Often, they wouldn’t speak English, and because of the shared drunkenness, the fluency of the language mattered little, allowing for hours-long discussions about every imaginable topic.

Talk to other immigrants who don’t speak English – When I moved to Berlin, I falsely assumed that anyone who has moved here already speaks English. That was far from the truth. Many immigrants speak their native tongue and German. Being able to speak German also means you can converse with this entire group of people, immigrants just like me, whom I’d otherwise not be able to talk to.

Understand your native language better – I read somewhere, “You can never understand one language until you understand at least two”. Learning grammar intentionally as an adult made me appreciate the languages I natively speak. It helped me understand the differences in how a sentence is structured in English or in Hindi, just because I now knew the grammatical parts of a sentence in German.

In conclusion

I hope this article motivated you to start learning German. At the very least, hope the article was amusing to read. I intend to write about my other experiences as an immigrant in Germany, so stay tuned for that.

Thank you for reading!