When Londoner Amber Tallon started learning German at the age of 12, she “took to it like a duck to water”, she says.
An A-level in the language and modules in German at the University of Oxford, where she studied history, have helped her, now 30, to her “dream job”, working as a Blue Badge Guide in London, where some of the large range of tours she offers are to German students.
“As English people we have such a bad rap for not learning languages, assuming that everyone is going to speak English. I think it’s just polite to learn even the basics of the language … it puts you on the right foot,” she says.
She volunteers a few of her favourite German compound words, to illustrate “how creative a language it is … the heart of the matter captured in a single word”.
“Schokoladenseite”, which translates literally as chocolate side and means a person’s good side, and “Kabelsalat” (tangled cables), are two of her treasured gems, both nodding to the American humorist Mark Twain, who wrote in 1880 that acquiring the “art of German” was akin to assembling a collection of “alphabet processions”.
Caroline Wyatt, a BBC presenter whose long career as a foreign correspondent started in Berlin in the early 90s thanks to her German language skills, says learning German “really enriched my life as a human being”.
“It takes away the fear … because thanks to the language, you think: ‘I can understand this place.’”
As a result, she recalls being “perfectly happy” when she secured a job as a business correspondent for the BBC World Service in Berlin in 1993 in her mid-20s “to slip a suitcase in the back of a car, head to Harwich, get on a ferry and drive to Berlin before satnav. “It wasn’t that it wasn’t scary, but it just felt like the world was opening up.”
Tallon and Wyatt are something of a rarity these days, with the number of pupils having chosen to study German at A-Level in 2024 standing at just 2,261. Entries for German have more than halved over the last decade, there is an increasing dearth of German teachers (not helped by Brexit) and some higher education institutes are considering closing down their German departments.
The decline has prompted a wider community of German scholars, with diplomats and the occasional politician, to search for creative ways to prevent German being consigned to the academic scrapheap.
Next month, the Association for German Studies in Great Britain and Ireland will meet for its 92nd annual conference, hosted by the German department at the University of Leeds, to discuss the future of studying the language.
One of its keynote speakers, the German ambassador to the UK, Miguel Berger, is behind the initiative “Making the Case for German”, together with the Goethe Institut, and the UK Department for Education’s (DoE) German promotion programme – a joint effort with the British Council to re-energise language learning in state-maintained primary and secondary schools in the UK. Hatched under the last government, all participants hope the latter project will also be embraced by the new administration.
Berger says the aim is “to make German once again a more popular choice for language learners in the UK”.
Andrea Pfeil, the Goethe Institut’s head of language for north west Europe, says language skills are still needed in the job market in the UK, where “German is the most sought-after foreign language … especially since Brexit”.
Knowledge of German appeals to employers above and beyond the ability to speak it, Pfeil says. “Applicants with A-level German have a veritable Alleinstellungsmerkmal (a unique selling point), because they demonstrate a level of overall competence that gives them better access to the job market.
“This is something that parents are often more interested in than pupils initially. This also goes for the fact that Britons with German language skills can study in Germany, where there are, in general, no student fees, which is a huge advantage.”
Pfeil believes German learning could thrive in the long term if more people become aware of its advantages.
The Goethe Institut, with the DoE, has also engaged the talents of Axel Scheffler, the UK-based German illustrator of The Gruffalo and other Julia Donaldson characters, in the hope of boosting enthusiasm for German language learning in primary schools and helping its progress in secondary schools and beyond. Scheffler has produced illustrations for a series of stories about an alien who arrives in Germany, aimed at encouraging an interest in the language.
“It’s obvious the earlier you start the better, and that learning foreign languages is important especially in this country, especially after Brexit which I think closed Britain off more from the rest of Europe,” Scheffler says. “Being bilingual myself and living in another language, I think any other language enriches one’s mind, one’s chances in life in every way, the openness to other cultures.”
Henning Wehn, the German standup comic who came to Britain more than 20 years ago hardly able to speak English, who was recently credited by King Charles for having “given us an understanding of German quirks”, says language learning is crucial to “opening your mind”, but believes all the teaching in the world is no replacement for immersion in the country itself.
“The only time you really learn the language is living in the country … you become part of the fabric. Google Translate is no substitute for connecting, for understanding the jokes, or Only Fools and Horses.”
