Do any of you have any experience with this? My middle kid, the one in Lebanon, is talking about it. He speaks NO German. Is it realistic at all for him to do this? We will not be financing him after he gets his bachelor’s degree in December.
A little bit of vicarious, not-quite-on-point experience.
First, I had a cousin start a neuro-psychology PhD program in Denmark ten years or so ago. I know it was not a good experience; I don’t know the gory details of exactly how it was not a good experience. I’m sure she had no Danish before she decided to do the program there. She is very smart (among other things, she was accepted to college at all of HYPSM, and she is now a tenure-track assistant professor at one of the UCs); she must have had decent reason to believe studying in Denmark would work before she decided to do it. She was able to transfer to a US program, though, and everything worked out fine.
Second, a nephew moved to Germany @ 27 to pursue a music career five or six years ago. He had absolutely no German. He has had a great deal of success there, and basically plans to live in Berlin indefinitely. It is only in the past year or so that he has really gotten fluent in German (a German girlfriend has helped a lot). Not being able to speak German did not really seem to hamper his career there or his enjoyment of the country . . . but of course he was not being graded on any regular basis, and he was comparing it to years of frustration and soul-killing day jobs in New York.
Third, I think a lot of European programs purport to be taught in English, as more or less the universal language of scholarship these days. There was a long article I read a couple of years ago about US students doing undergraduate degrees in Germany. Some of them had little or no German before they started. That wasn’t without problems, but some of them did OK.
The German institution may require that foreign students demonstrate German language ability at a B2 level. We found some do, some don’t when we were researching. B2 refers to the European international standard for determining language ability, with standardized testing at A1, A2, B1, B2, C1, C2 levels. Language info requirement was clear on websites for the institutions.
That said, I have been in a German class with a man who has 2 dual citizen kids. They spoke German in the home since the kids were born. Each went to a German institution (undergrad) as fluent speakers and readers and AP German. The student focused on a liberal arts area found that her German writing was not at the expected college level despite having passed the entrance tests to her university with the highest possible score. The kid in a tech area had an easier time; fewer writing requirements, I guess.
My teacher, a German national, has similarly prepped her kids for German institutions with a (US) high school German course sequence culminating with AP German, language camps in Germany and, of course, life-long German language in their home. First of her kids graduates high school next year and mom is not taking it as a given that adjusting to a German language institution will be easy for the kid.
Just a small datapoint.
One of the members in my D’s (who doesn’t know German, and is currently a CS PhD student at UC Berkeley) Qual exam committee is a math professor who will be going back to Germany next year. He recently asked my D whether she was interested in a post-doc position at Leipzig University where he would be teaching.
My D is seriously considering it, and plans to go to Leipzig this summer on the professor’s invitation to check it out.
I think if it were not feasible, the professor wouldn’t have asked.
Doesn’t it totally depend on where they want to go? A friend did a masters at the Hertie school, in English.
I would imagine he must be thinking about going somewhere with English instruction.
My husband, was a post-doc at a Max-Planck Institute in Germany and was assured that speaking no German would not be an issue as lab business was conducted in English and it was a very international lab. DH is no dummy and took a semester of CC German before we went. He discovered that while journal club was in English and papers were written in English people actually mostly spoke German to each other. Certainly at lunch and after hours. Luckily my husband is a quick study and after a few weeks of “I can’t even hear when one word ends and the next one begins” he actually got pretty good at it. We really enjoyed our time in Germany, but there’s no question the experience was vastly improved by being able to speak the language. That said if you get a lot of internationals together the common tongue tends to be English, though I spent some time at a Goethe Institute that had a huge number of students who spoke Spanish together.
I just remembered: I was talking with an old friend yesterday, and he told me that one of his kids had gotten an MBA in Spain, at IESE (I think; my friend was not sharp on which school, and their acronyms are pretty similar). While we didn’t discuss how much Spanish his kid knew before going there, I doubt it was that much. The kid lived in Germany for several years while growing up, and undoubtedly had German as his “first” second language.
Apparently, this was very successful, both in the kid’s eyes and in his father’s.
@MaineLonghorn I looked into this last year and went school by school. For graduate programs, I recall several of the best had classes in English. Also he’ll learn German along the way but you can navigate the country easily with English. But Rosetta Stone for daily interactions is a good start.
But personally I find Germany to be a very unique place. And culturally very different than the USA. Especially around frankness or bluntness and general sense of humor. What I call warmth. It’s not bad just really different.
It would be a hard pass for me.
There are other European options- like France - that mesh with his Lebanese experience so much better.
Thanks for all the thoughts - I will pass them along to my son.
If he does decide to do this, I think it’s worth the financial investment to go over early and study at a Goethe Institute, which is a government run language school. If you google them and then go to their website you’ll see dates and prices for their programs.
I think that having done Lebanon, surviving in Germany would be a breeze!
It depends very much on what he wants to do, and where, and in what language.
I would not be worried about someone doing a post doc in a maths department. More worried about someone doing something post bachelor in a humanities department.
You can pm me with more details if you like.
Oh, one other comment. I remember that a year or two ago someone posted on here about their experience. I can’t remember whether it was undergrad or grad. The point was that there is very little advising, and the student made a mistake (I believe in course sequencing or a prerequisite) that he/ she would have expected to be waived if they were in the US. Not so in Germany. This would have resulted in adding a whole additional year to their program. Rather than do that, the student decided to transfer the credits to either a US or a U.K. school to finish up in a more timely manner. Sorry that I can’t remember the details, but it stuck with me because I’ve lived in Germany before and had been frustrated several times about the cultural differences between Germanys strict adhesion to the rules verses in the US I feel like a lot of people will try to be helpful to find an exception or a work-around as long as the intent of the rule is being followed.
He’d need basic German even if the classes are in English because Daily life and friend conversations will be in German.
I suppose he’s interested in Germany to continue his work with Syrian refugees?
No specific knowledge about grad programs, but I agree that a cultural difference that takes getting used to is the rigid attention to rules – registering when entering and leaving the country, progress through a program etc. There simply isn’t the kind of flexibility we are used to in the US where an unintentional mistake etc. can often be smoothed over by someone with authority. Not in Germany.
I think it was late in the fall semester, there was a distressed parent whose kid was doing a post-grad program in Germany and the student realized a deadline or requirement had been missed not because of error by the student, something about a bank payment not going through etc. The student could not register for the next semester classes, despite taking the issue up and around as far as it could go. It sounded like the student left Germany and the fall semester of classes was a wash, because there would be no transcript of the students’s work.
I’ve lived in Germany, it is not a warm culture generally – polite, collegial, but a little more formal, at least in the cities – but we loved our time there, from the emphasis on healthy lifestyle, lots of walking, shopping locally etc., and I’d go back in an instant!
You are all so helpful! I need to send him the link to this page now. 