Recently in the news, I came upon an article by Steve McGookin titled, "Happy countries, committed workers" about a study done by Dr. Garry Gelade to determine the factors that produce committed workers. I was struck by the fact that Denmark and the Netherlands scored high (i.e. they had contented workers.
I also noticed that both countries had multilingual employees and German was one of the spoken "second" languages as the article states,
"Denmark has high numbers of multilingual staff: 80%of the Danish workforce speak English, 53% speak German and 11% speak French."and
"The literacy rate in the Netherlands is unusually high, about 99%, while much of the Dutch workforce is multilingual. Most Dutch are fluent in English, and more than half speak German fluently, and a quarter French."
Learning German quickly would be a useful thing to do since more Central and Eastern European countries (where German often surpasses English as the second most spoken language) have joined the EU. Thus whether you are planning on going skiing in the Swiss Alps, clubbing in Berlin or sampling the high culture of imperial Vienna, a little Deutsch will go a long way.
Learn German Quickly
