> but the chat absolutely needs to happen in German. Why? Work culture.
Rather: because a lot of less formal thoughts (including jokes) are difficult to express in English since they often rely on structures that the English language does not have.
> if you speak German, you risk sounding like a child
I can ensure you that you don't sound like a child (nursery language is typically not taught in language courses for foreign speakers). Rather, you sound like a person who did not take learning German seriously.
It goes both ways, of course. There are Germans who do not take learning English seriously, and foreigners who stumble because many informal expressions (including jokes) are difficult to express in German since they rely on structures that the language does not have.
I miss speaking my native language, too, but English is what I take as common ground. As an adult, I can never hope to compete on native German fluency with someone who's born and raised in Germany to educated German parents. That's just biased.
You missed the point. Just take an immigrant in front of you next time and see him make two mistakes in a row in one sentence while casually talking to him (maybe he's tired, maybe he's lazy but who's to judge). You'd inherently think less of him, deep down, wouldn't you?
> Just take an immigrant in front of you next time and see him make two mistakes in a row in one sentence while casually talking to him (maybe he's tired, maybe he's lazy but who's to judge). You'd inherently think less of him, deep down, wouldn't you?
No, I wouldn't.
I think a lot comes down to differences in mentality:
- Many Germans think that they had a hard time getting to a decent level in English. So they expect the same willingness from foreigners to get to a decent level in German. (#)
- Many German native speaker really care about their language: It is a very common situation that German native speakers correct both native speakers and people who learn German as foreign language. With some people who learn German as second language, I get the reaction "Even if this is grammatically wrong, you nevertheless understood the sentence.". I do believe this person did not get my point: Among English native speakers I often observe this mentality for their native language, but I would really claim that "German language is a kind of thinking", so such mistakes really feel like a wrong-typed computer program.
So
> As an adult, I can never hope to compete on native German fluency with someone who's born and raised in Germany to educated German parents.
Being able to compete on this level is not something that is expected from you. But (also cf. (#)) willing to cram brutally hard to get near to this level over some time is.
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Thus, to come back to your point:
> Just take an immigrant in front of you next time and see him make two mistakes in a row in one sentence while casually talking to him (maybe he's tired, maybe he's lazy but who's to judge). You'd inherently think less of him, deep down, wouldn't you?
As I wrote: I really wouldn't think less of this person because he makes mistakes. But - very in accordance of what I wrote - I would think less of such a person if he doesn't work really hard to get better in German fast.
In other words: It's really not about not making mistakes (everyone does), but about not working hard to get better.
Hart daran zu arbeiten, besser zu werden, führt nicht immer zu linearen Fortschritten.
See, I didn't need to write in German, but you instantly understand my point better. Gleich und gleich gesellt sich gern, that's also true when it comes to speaking the same language. But you can't create born-and-raised Germans from immigrant adults, and attempting to fix them at every opportune moment just gives the impression that being better at German somehow gives you an air of superiority. In some cultures, this is just straight up bad manners, so is quoting single sentences and writing essays about them while missing the forest for the trees.