Such unsuccessful and early relocations cost companies millions of dollars each year. Learning another language and culture normally opens the student's eyes to other ways of doing things leading to more openness to others and flexibility. This is a real asset when working with people from different backgrounds. Knowing the language is an asset and opens doors when working for a company either from another country or one of the over 500 Minnesota companies doing business in Germany and other countries where German is the language of business. Some people say that German is harder to learn.
All languages take a lot of study and effort to learn.
English is a Germanic language and as such they share many words and common grammatical structures. Languages are taught in age appropriate ways at the different levels. Language teaching has changed a great deal in the last 20 years and students learn German with no greater or lesser difficulty than any other language. It has been shown in Thomas Cooper's study Foreign Language Study and SAT-Verbal Scores , that students learning a foreign language get higher scores on the SAT even when prior verbal skills have been factored out. There is some indication that students of German do even better on the tests than students of other languages.