From Heiko:
— Germans like to complain. Even during the best of times, Germans will nag about… pretty much everything. That’s why, for example, German tourists have such a bad reputation
— Germans like to read about failures. It helps us ignore that others are more successful
— We think German is such an important language that we can expect all foreign language aired on TV or radio to be dubbed. Technically, a lot of Germans do speak rather decent English (and French, Russian or even Spanish). Often enough though we don’t speak it perfectly well so instead of being prone to make mistakes we rather pretend German is the only language we know.
Because i lived in Germany i do agree with this last point about the language, it scared me the whole time i was there. Germans of my generation, not speaking a word english or french? me not getting it. Scared, she flew back to Canada.
and i thought Germans where cool.