Why Study German?
- German is the number 1 language spoken in Europe
- German lets you communicate with more than 100 million people worldwide
- Germany is the no 1 export nation in the world and has the 4th largest economy in the world
- German tourists are everywhere – they spend the most tourist dollars of any nation
- The German domain extension .de is the second most popular in the world – after .com
- 1 out of 10 books in the world is published in German
- German-speaking countries have one of the richest intellectual tradition in the world – famous philosophers include Hegel, Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Adorno, Benjamin, Marx, Wittgenstein
- German-speaking nobe laureates include Gerhart Hauptmann, Carl Spitteler, Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, Nelly Sachs, Heinrich Böll, Elias Canetti, Günter Grass, Elfriede Jelinek, and Herta Müller
- German is the second most commonly used scientific language in the world and German engineers are world leaders. German inventions include: printing press, bicycle, car telephone, x-ray, television, jet engine, binary computers, Mp3 …
- Famous German brands – VW, Audi, Mercedes, BMW, Porsche, Bayer, Nivea, Adidas, Bosch, Lufthansa, Jägermeister, ….
"I found my smattering of German very useful here; indeed, I don't know how I should be able to get on without it."
-Jonathan Harker on his way to Transylvania in Bram Stoker's Dracula, 1897
Here are some related youtube videos:
Meet the Germans - Typical German
One more reason to learn German
And from wikipedia:
