Posted by mertbio 5 days ago
He landed in a relatively rare bubble: an international tech company, an English-speaking workplace, and a professional profile the system values. That experience is valid, but it is hardly representative. Even this bubble is shrinking as companies cut local roles and move more work to lower-cost locations.
The rest of Germany becomes visible once you leave the corporate layer. Try finding an apartment, dealing with a government office, getting a timely appointment, or starting a business. The system is often slow, rigid, inaccessible, and exhausting.
Even a high salary does not automatically translate into prosperity. After taxes, housing, and everyday costs, building meaningful savings can still be surprisingly difficult.
Germany also has a way of pushing you into an NPC life: work, pay taxes, follow the process, book everything months ahead, stay quiet on Sundays, and remain on the approved path.
Meanwhile, the article feels oddly detached from a country facing industrial pressure, job cuts, housing shortages, heavy bureaucracy, economic anxiety, and growing political anger.
If you live in an unfurnished apartment or buy your own sooner, then you also get to see how the service sector currently sees all white-collar workers: Cash cows who don't know how to hold a screwdriver properly. Add on top of that the joys of building a family in Germany and the associated paperwork and multiplying appointments, and suddenly you find yourself living that NPC life, being yelled at on the street for insisting on their rights, misreading the situation and thinking you broke the most superficial law. While having the privilege to pay into the tax system that drains your take-home pay, of course. Being a rule follower yourself doesn't always shield you from all these.
Rather: because a lot of less formal thoughts (including jokes) are difficult to express in English since they often rely on structures that the English language does not have.
> if you speak German, you risk sounding like a child
I can ensure you that you don't sound like a child (nursery language is typically not taught in language courses for foreign speakers). Rather, you sound like a person who did not take learning German seriously.
You missed the point. Just take an immigrant in front of you next time and see him make two mistakes in a row in one sentence while casually talking to him (maybe he's tired, maybe he's lazy but who's to judge). You'd inherently think less of him, deep down, wouldn't you?
No, I wouldn't.
I think a lot comes down to differences in mentality:
- Many Germans think that they had a hard time getting to a decent level in English. So they expect the same willingness from foreigners to get to a decent level in German. (#)
- Many German native speaker really care about their language: It is a very common situation that German native speakers correct both native speakers and people who learn German as foreign language. With some people who learn German as second language, I get the reaction "Even if this is grammatically wrong, you nevertheless understood the sentence.". I do believe this person did not get my point: Among English native speakers I often observe this mentality for their native language, but I would really claim that "German language is a kind of thinking", so such mistakes really feel like a wrong-typed computer program.
So
> As an adult, I can never hope to compete on native German fluency with someone who's born and raised in Germany to educated German parents.
Being able to compete on this level is not something that is expected from you. But (also cf. (#)) willing to cram brutally hard to get near to this level over some time is.
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Thus, to come back to your point:
> Just take an immigrant in front of you next time and see him make two mistakes in a row in one sentence while casually talking to him (maybe he's tired, maybe he's lazy but who's to judge). You'd inherently think less of him, deep down, wouldn't you?
As I wrote: I really wouldn't think less of this person because he makes mistakes. But - very in accordance of what I wrote - I would think less of such a person if he doesn't work really hard to get better in German fast.
In other words: It's really not about not making mistakes (everyone does), but about not working hard to get better.
See, I didn't need to write in German, but you instantly understand my point better. Gleich und gleich gesellt sich gern, that's also true when it comes to speaking the same language. But you can't create born-and-raised Germans from immigrant adults, and attempting to fix them at every opportune moment just gives the impression that being better at German somehow gives you an air of superiority. In some cultures, this is just straight up bad manners, so is quoting single sentences and writing essays about them while missing the forest for the trees.
It's absolutely normal that people speak their mother tongue when they have the possibility. One can be kind and speak English to make a guest feel more comfortable, but if a permanent resident refuses to learn the local language fluently he should not demand that everyone else bends over backwards to accommodate him.
the article is just sharing his positive personal experience... it’s not a sociological treatise. but i agree with you, he’s clearly talking from within a bubble.