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Most Germans these days can hold a basic conversation in English, but this was not the case at the gigantic office stationery factory just outside Berlin where I spent a year of my 20s working.
This was no rusting old communist plant. It was a 400-million-Deutschmark investment project built immediately after reunification, offering jobs to 1,000 newly liberated East Germans from the dreary nearby town of Falkensee.
Though nearly 150ft tall and clearly designed to be as imposing as some mega factory from the industrial era, it had glass frontage and was painted in kiddie-friendly colours, like a budget version of the MI6 building in Vauxhall dropped onto an otherwise barren and extremely flat Brandenburg plain.
When I was there, about a decade ago, much of the floor space was rented out to smaller firms and migrant labour was moving in, which included me, desperately needing money after moving to Berlin on a whim with my last student loan payment.
But among the staff were still many Angelikas and Jürgens: frumpy, chain-smoking, middle-aged women and pot-bellied men with moustaches who’d wolf down massive German mid-day meals of pork knuckle and boiled potatoes in the canteen. Then there was a younger contingent of heavily tattooed football obsessives, who would talk of almost nothing other than Bundesliga results.
This collection of rough-but-loveable East German stereotypes, with whom I could not speak in English, was largely the reason I picked up a second language as an adult – something I’d never considered likely even a few months beforehand.
It is true that you cannot learn a language passively from the environment without studying vocabulary, case tables and conjugations. But it is also true that achieving fluency purely through classroom instruction or gamified apps is incredibly difficult.
The language has to seep into your consciousness, so much so that a feel for its musicality and rhythm lets you know what to say before you have worked out which noun is the indirect object of the sentence and remembered its gender.
And this only really happens through living a life through the language, with each daily interaction or failed attempt to communicate chiselling itself into your memory.
Good classroom language-learning will try to simulate immersion, but discussing your favourite holiday destination with your teacher is much more forgettable than, say, trying to understand as much as possible of Jürgen’s tale of what he was doing the night the Berlin Wall came down. Or having to defuse the situation after being taken into the ultra segment of a Union Berlin crowd by the football obsessives while unknowingly wearing the opposition team’s colours.
All the clichés about languages enriching your life are true. Being able to speak to someone else in their native tongue is immensely rewarding and it is difficult to really understand a foreign culture without it.
The way a language shapes how a person thinks is perhaps overstated, but it’s hard to avoid noticing similarities between a language’s structure and the history and culture of the people who speak it.
For example, the most common way to express liking something in German is “es gefällt mir” (literally, it pleases me). The speaker here is passive. The object, the thing they like, is acting on him or her; its inherent qualities force the reaction.
In English the perspective is reversed. When you say “I like that”, you and your decision to bestow affection are being expressed, not the qualities of the object you like.
Is it then surprising that Germany is associated with abstract reasoning, precision engineering and authoritarianism – and England with individualism, liberty and capitalism? (English is also the only language that capitalises “I”).
Foreign language learning is not popular in Britain, even our diplomats are notoriously bad at it. Last year the University of Nottingham became the first Russell Group university to suspend its foreign language courses for new students.
More from Daniel Hardaker
The Falklands are quietly turning into a micro Dubai
Should the trend continue and classroom options dry up for budding language students, I wouldn’t exactly recommend a year of menial labour to study it, but it does work.
