> If you are not an engineer you must have an almost excellent level of local language --> an excellent level of a language is only possible if you are immersed daily over a long time and have the time to study

I disagree: for many jobs, it is expected that you have a decent level of English, but at least in Germany, you are often not immersed a lot in English. So you have to get decent in English with barely any immersion.

I thus have a feeling that because many Germans had to learn hard to get somewhat decent in English on their own, they have the same expectation on immigrants to learn really hard on their own to get good in German fast (without demanding immersion).

▲

eldaisfish 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Your argument ignores one important aspect - incentives.

English is the global lingua franca, hence the incentive to learn English is incredibly strong. Outside of Germany, what exact benefit does the German language get you?

	▲	aleph_minus_one 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> Outside of Germany, what exact benefit does the German language get you? German is also official language in Austria, Switzerland and Luxembourg. In many neighbouring countries it is also often well-understood and/or there exist language minorities. > English is the global lingua franca From my professional experience I can tell that depending on the countries or persons from countries that you deal with, Spanish, French, Russian or Chinese can be much more important than English. So, calling English the global lingua franca is in my opinion rather based on a selection bias on specific countries.