Dear Jessica,

Thank you very much for your email. We happened to have a departmental meeting today and briefly discussed your request.

The problem, as already mentioned, does not only affect German, but other foreign languages, too (German maybe more seriously in some respects), and it goes beyond university education. It starts at school level and has to do with a conscious and calculated effort to streamline the school curriculum to help eliminate tensions in learning – in other words, to reduce the number of subjects in an effort to reduce dissatisfaction among students (and perhaps their parents). One direct [...]