Why Learn German?

The honest reasons to learn German are smaller and more specific than the ones usually given, and most of the usual ones fall apart when you ask where the number came from. This page keeps only what can be traced to a published source and says plainly where a reason is a judgement rather than a fact.

If you are looking for a figure about salaries, speakers or job prospects, you will not find one here, because the ones in circulation are mostly uncited.

The one number worth quoting

Among Europe's school pupils, German is the most widely learned foreign language after English — narrowly. That is a published statistic with an owner, and it is the only one on this page.

Eurostat, the European Union's statistical office, reports in its foreign language learning statistics, with data extracted in April 2026, that in 2024 slightly fewer than a fifth of upper-secondary pupils in the EU were learning German (19.3%), Spanish (17.9%) or French (17.2%) as a foreign language. English dwarfs all three: 96.3% of upper-secondary pupils on general programmes were learning it.

Two honest qualifications, both from Eurostat's own notes. Its country analysis for these figures excludes Ireland. And the gap between German, Spanish and French is roughly two percentage points across the three — German leads, and it leads by an amount too small to build an argument on.

So the accurate claim is: German is the joint-leading second foreign language in European secondary education, not a dominant one. That is worth knowing and is not worth exaggerating.

The reasons that are simply facts

Some reasons need no statistic because they are matters of record.

German is one of the European Union's 24 official languages, and one of the four it started with. The EU's own languages page lists Dutch, French, German and Italian as official since 1958, with every subsequent language added by an accession.

It is an official language in more than one country, which is why the certificate landscape has more than one issuer: Deutsche Welle's own exam pages name Germany's Goethe-Institut, telc, and Austria's ÖSD, and mention Switzerland's fide test as a separate instrument. A language examined by several national bodies is a language with institutional weight behind it.

And the language-learning industry itself is unusually German. Babbel is a Berlin company, Lingoda is a Berlin company, and Rosetta Stone's own site footer identifies the entity behind it as Rosetta Stone GmbH, a division of IXL Learning. That is not an argument for learning German, but it is a small, checkable indicator of where this industry is headquartered.

The reason the market quietly confirms

Here is a signal worth more than most assertions, because a company pays for it rather than saying it.

Lingoda's own languages menu on 24 September 2026 listed what it teaches and to what level: German from A1 to C1, English from A1 to C1, French from A1 to B2, Spanish from A1 to B2, Business English from A1 to B2, and Italian from A1 to A2. German is tied with English as the deepest thing it teaches, and it goes a full band further than French or Spanish.

Building and staffing a C1 curriculum is expensive, and a company only does it where there is demand for advanced study. The demand for advanced German is largely people who need it for a university place, a job or a residence permit — which is the real answer to why people learn German, stated by somebody's business plan instead of by a marketing page.

The reasons that are judgements, said as judgements

These are the reasons this site finds persuasive and cannot prove, and they are labelled as such rather than dressed up.

If you read in any of several fields — philosophy, musicology, classical studies, art history, parts of engineering — a great deal of primary and secondary literature is in German and always will be. That is a reason with a clear shape: it applies enormously to some people and not at all to most.

If you already speak English, German is the nearest major language that is genuinely a different grammatical system. Spanish and French teach you vocabulary; German teaches you that word order and case can carry meaning your own language handles with prepositions. Whether that is a benefit is a matter of taste.

And if you intend to live somewhere German is spoken, the argument is not really about the language. It is that the amount of ordinary life conducted in English drops sharply outside large cities and professional offices.

The reasons to be suspicious of

A few claims travel widely and should be treated carefully, not because they are certainly false but because their sources are rarely given.

Salary figures for German speakers. Any specific number here needs a named labour-market source and a country, and the ones in circulation usually have neither. This site publishes none.

Speaker counts. Estimates for German speakers worldwide vary substantially depending on whether second-language speakers are included and how they are counted, and the widely repeated figures are rarely attributed to a specific survey with a date. No count appears here.

"Most in-demand language" claims. These are usually derived from a single job-board scrape, and the job board is rarely named.

Cognitive-benefit claims about language learning generally. There is genuine research in this area and also a great deal of loose summarising of it, and this is a site about learning German rather than about neuroscience.

Is it worth it for you

The useful version of this question is not "is German valuable" but "is German valuable to you, given what it costs". The cost side is well described: German is easy at the start and expensive in the middle, and the expensive part is grammar that has to become automatic.

That trade is clearly worth it if you have a concrete destination — a course, a job, a city, a literature. It is a much closer call if the reason is general self-improvement, because German will ask for more sustained drilling than Spanish or Italian will, and a language you stop at month five costs you the whole investment and returns nothing. If you decide it is worth it, the routes into German are all on one board with their prices as read.

If you are going to start, start with the route that costs nothing and find out in a month whether the destination is real.