Why learning German is a big issue? These are young people who can learn a language easily and in the beginning nobody expects you so high proficiency and people will always help and encourage you to learn the language. In Europe many educated folks know min 2 languages more and very open to learn more, you just need to leave your comfort zone. Learning languages also develops intellectually.
There was a guy from Brasil in my first year CS studies (in Poland). His Polish was passable I guess, but it was just no match during say intense Linear Algebra lecture, where Polish native speakers were barely keeping up (because the subject itself was enough and required tons of concentration). Sure enough, he dropped out after the first semester.
It is not the same to have level C1 (completely fluent) in German and having the vocabulary and level to study at a German university. Exams in Germany are never multiple-choice and require you to write with a scientific vocabulary and idioms. This means an additional year of intensive German alone to have the vocabulary to pass exams at university.
> In Europe many educated folks know min 2 languages more and very open to learn more
Am Eastern-European, my mother tongue is a Romance language, I speak and read English, read and understand Italian, French and Spanish. German has proved too much of a hurdle for me.
> Am Eastern-European, my mother tongue is a Romance language, I speak and read English, read and understand Italian, French and Spanish. German has proved too much of a hurdle for me.
Of course if you speak some Romance language natively, other Romance languages will be a lot easier than a Germanic language as German. Here you should rather compare German with a language from a different language family, such as some Slavic language.
I (native German speaker) think that at least for English speakers French and German are about equally hard. The main difference is that French has a "smoother" learning curve, while German's grammar is really grueling at the beginning (but this is also said of the Russian grammar).
What in my opinion many people don't get is learning German means learning the unpleasant grammar (IMHO best by rote drill) inside out. Concentrating on the vocabulary and getting the grammar later might work for other languages that are less grammar-centric than German, but I can imagine German is very confusing for non-native speakers, if they are not rather certain in the grammar.
As soon as one is sufficiently certain in German's grammar (i.e. you don't have to think about conjugation and declination anymore), the learning experience will become much more pleasant, since in my opinion how words are "built up from parts" (in German in particular prominently by juxtaposition) is "in some sense much more logical and memorable" than how words are built in English or Romance language. A rather funny take on this for German animal names can be found under https://www.babbel.com/en/magazine/funny-animal-names-in-ger...
