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Want a job? Learn German.

Unemployment statistics out of Europe show that German-speaking countries far outpace the rest in terms of job growth and low unemployment rates.

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Fabrizio Bensch/Reuters/File
This file photo shows the Swiss national flag atop of the Swiss embassy in Germany with a German national flag atop of the Reichstag building in Berlin. Karlsson argues that German-speaking countries, like Switzerland and Germany, tend to have better employment situations than the rest of their European counterparts.

I am fluent in two languages: namely English as readers may have concluded from the fact that I am able to blog in English here, and Swedish, which is my native language, as readers may have concluded from the fact that I'm from Sweden (and blog in Swedish here). Due to the similarities of Norwegian and Danish to Swedish, I understand these languages mostly, but that is only due to the fact that the languages are so similar, I haven't made any effort to study them.

Setting aside my "coincidental" understanding of Norwegian and Danish, the third language that I have some understanding of is German. I studied it in Sweden's equivalent of high school, and though I've forgotten some of what I learned (It was a lot of years since I was in high school), I remember most of it, and have recently upgraded my vocabulary by watching on youtube German language versions of movies I've watched. Still, I am far from being fluent in German , so for the time being I can only say that Ich kann deutsch sprechen und verstehen, aber nur ein bisschen.

Anyway, the reason I brought up this subject is that I've noticed an interesting pattern in the latest unemployment statistics: two out of the four countries in the EU with the lowest unemployment rates, namely Austria and Germany have German as the only official language and in one of the remaining, Luxembourg, it is one of the three co-existing official languages (along with French and Luxembourgish, the latter being basically a local version of German).
Add to that two German speaking countries outside of the EU, Switzerland and Liechtenstein, have even lower unemployment rates than Austria, Germany and Luxembourg, and it seems that at least for the time being the unemployed of Europe should try to learn German and apply for jobs in German speaking countries.

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