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Why skilled workers come to Germany and then leave again

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Re: Why skilled workers come to Germany and then leave again

#681

Post by ItsYan »

adamddev1 wrote: post #678
mstaoru wrote: post #580

I can add my anecdote to the language barrier points. At work we speak English, everybody speak English all the time, all docs are in English, all meetings are in English. There's an occasional German email every now and then but people will switch. When we go to a "team building" retreat, all the same teammates that happily chatted with us expats in English just switch to German 100%, full stop. You can come and sta…

Excellent anecdote. I'm not sure if you're making a judgement about their behavior at the team event. I'm an English native speaker, new in Germany, and learning German. I personally find it really annoying and awkward when other foreigners come into German social situations and expect or push them to speak English. - What right do I have as the foreigner to intrude and get them to speak English? - Social life in ano…

On the other hand, the Brits will happily switch from their accent/dialect to accommodate a foreigner.

No such thing has happened to me in Germany.

Re: Why skilled workers come to Germany and then leave again

#682

Post by jcarrano »

ikut3hva wrote: post #165

Hi everyone I don’t usually comment on topics like this because there are so many biases and different perspectives involved. In the end, I believe only the person who has actually gone through the experience can truly understand it; otherwise, it often becomes just another judgment. We are an ASEAN family earning more than €200k gross annually (sorry for mentioning the TC, but there is a reason for it—please keep re…

> life is short—play naked!

Such a concise way of saying what I've been thinking for a long time.

Re: Why skilled workers come to Germany and then leave again

#683

Post by panick21_ »

IncreasePosts wrote: post #217
throw-the-towel wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But a much older culture.

There was no unified "German" culture before Germany, so it doesn't make sense to talk about a "German" culture. Is it the northern maritime German? The southern Bavarian German? The Rhinelanders? The Swabians? Swiss germans? Northern Italian germans? Austrian Germans? There was the German ethnicity, and a mosaic of Germanic languages.

I actually disagree with you. If you look at the centuries before 1870 there clearly was a recognition of a common culture, this isn't really controversial.

People often laugh about the Holy Roman Empire (mostly people who have not studied it) but it did actually serve as a distinct legal and cultural tradition for much the area that is now Germany (and more).

The language are different but not that different, with some effort you could understand each other. Many Germans from different parts fought together in mercenary bands or for Holy Roman Empire armies.

During the Revolution in the 1850 they tried to establish a unified Germany, so clearly the idea had wide recognition by then. You don't have movement like that spring up out of nowhere. After the Napoleonic war, German Confederation was a very recognized and understood fact.

Sure if was not fully 'unified' but neither is French or Spanish culture.

- Peter H. Wilson, The Holy Roman Empire: A Thousand Years of Europe’s History

- Helmut Walser Smith, Germany: A Nation in Its Time

Re: Why skilled workers come to Germany and then leave again

#684

Post by eunos »

froh wrote: post #122
probably_wrong wrote: post #48

I migrated to Germany 10+ years ago and I'm still here. Based on my limited experience, there are two big issues. First, things are bad : trains are getting worse every year, the highways are in disrepair (ask me about Bonn!), overloaded doctors, impossibly slow bureaucracy, economic crisis, growing inequality, housing crisis, and so on. If you're a fresh immigrant who cannot find a job in an economic crisis (aka "mo…

there is no certificate higher than C2, so "minimum" C2 is ridicerlus, ackchyually... I assume.thats your point here, but to bystanders: C2 is nearly native speaker language proficiency, nuanced, precise, eloquent. if language production is the job, or impeccable understanding is a must have, like as a psychotherapist, then C2 is a reasonable requirement. in contrast you can study in german language at a German unive…

> there is no certificate higher than C2, so "minimum" C2 is ridicerlus

A subtle hint they want born-and-raised German rather than immigrant.

Re: Why skilled workers come to Germany and then leave again

#685

Post by account42 »

rawbot wrote: post #53
4gotunameagain wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not a bad thing. Wealth inequality is destructive for societies.

I agree with the feeling, but the market doesn't. Inflation in the last 8 years has been slowly strangling families. And that's without mentioning the fact that owning an apartment or home is basically impossible without inheritance or being upper-class. So for most middle-class families, the work grind will continue for the rest of their life, until retirement (if it even exists by then), without anything to show fo…

Inflation outpacing median income is a symptom of wealth inequality.

Re: Why skilled workers come to Germany and then leave again

#686

Post by panick21_ »

IncreasePosts wrote: post #333
denismenace wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nonsense. Just because there was no stricly "unifed" (whatever that means) German culture does not mean that German culture does not exist. There is clearly a shared core of culture and ethnicity to all the listed peoples. But again you can continue with trying to make it seem as if everything is equal to everything else. I'll leave you with this little thought experiment. If we put a northen German, a Swiss German a…

Why would German culture start before unification, but American culture pops out of nothing at the founding of the nation?

US culture also starts earlier but the reality is a majority of what makes up US culture only showed up in the region much later. As well as expansion into Spanish and other areas that were absorbed.

Re: Why skilled workers come to Germany and then leave again

#687

Post by fransje26 »

bulbar wrote: post #552
stnikolauswagne wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is some sort of weird phenomenon that I cant quite put to words, but the core is: While there is a big chunk of the native german population speaking great english there is a subset of (often) service workers who... dont. Had multiple furniture movers come through my house the last few weeks, the only way to communicate with them was broken german, since they had no english skills and my (croatian? serbian?) sk…

That's basically why you should learn the language of the country you live in. Blaming people for not speaking English in Germany is pretty weird. How about learning German instead?

> Blaming people for not speaking English in Germany is pretty weird. How about learning German instead?

As the poster wrote:

>> At one point I ended up in the weirdest situation of my live were i translated the german instructions from the phone rep into english [..]

which implies that he does, in fact, speak German. The movers did not, though.

Re: Why skilled workers come to Germany and then leave again

#688

Post by jcgl »

alchemism wrote: post #502
djaro wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would disagree about it not being "easy". Learning a language certainly takes time and effort, but the fact that even the dumbest people in society can speak fluently, that literal toddlers learn languages, shows that it's far from difficult. It just requires turning your rational mind off, immersing yourself in the language and trusting things will work out, something which more rational/analytic people tend to st…

…young children have immense neural plasticity while adults, especially 40+, have little.

Just as importantly, they have little to no alternative. And then they are given every opportunity to learn—at school, by parents, and so on.

Re: Why skilled workers come to Germany and then leave again

#689

Post by delis-thumbs-7e »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #440
delis-thumbs-7e wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of this people opining “just learn the language” have learned a second language while working as adults, let alone learned German. You can get to A2 level pretty easy (in most indoeuropean languages at least), but jumping to B1 can seriously be a year or more of studying. You have to be able to handle basic daily situations in the given language and understand what is said in a TV or Radio show. With practice yo…

> None of this people opining “just learn the language” have learned a second language while working as adults, let alone learned German. I am very certain this is not true. The "just learn the language" people are typically rather people who are very talented in learning new languages (and often indeed to this as adults as a personal hobby - often even with languages from very different families), and thus are often…

I do typos and grammar mistakes in four languages (only two of them fluently) and it’s pretty easy to learn basic vocabulary, read a bit of a comic book and order coffee with a thick accent. A lot of “polyglots” who can do basic phrases in 11 languages and make videos about it on YouTube. There’s people who genuinely speak plenty of languages fluently, but they are quite humble about it. Reaching B1 after completing A2 is 200-300h of study, preferably in a class. That’s a lot for a working adult with a family.

However, there is plenty of people who think that they speak a language because they can order a coffee in some language close to theirs and have never lived in a foreign country for any extended period of time, ie. don’t know what they are talking about, and arguing from the position of complete ignorance say “just learn the language”.

The idea that there’s one country with one language is very recent actually, part of the nationalistic idealism of 19th Century. Most of the history, as it is still today, any nation is a mishmash of cultures, languages, dialects of various kinds and origins, there of course always being some official one (used to be Latin, then French, now it’s TikTok-memes). The fact that pur systems cannot facilitate that multitude is a shame and I believe those systems that can will succeed.

Re: Why skilled workers come to Germany and then leave again

#690

Post by eunos »

ikut3hva wrote: post #165

Hi everyone I don’t usually comment on topics like this because there are so many biases and different perspectives involved. In the end, I believe only the person who has actually gone through the experience can truly understand it; otherwise, it often becomes just another judgment. We are an ASEAN family earning more than €200k gross annually (sorry for mentioning the TC, but there is a reason for it—please keep re…

I thought if you have a blue card A1 is suffice?
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