I must say the English we were taught in school was, especially in the end (like most things in school) completely useless. Sorry, but we could roughly apply the language in practical use and then we read a lot of Shakespeare's works. Nice if you want to study English literature, but I doubt that many of the pupils went down this road. So we couldn't understand much from the daily used talks in TV/movies or how to write a thesis/fill an English form, but we could write an essays about Shakespeare's poetry, who actually used grammatical constructs no one is using today. I still remember one of these sonnets:

Shall I compare thee to a summerss day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate,
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summers lease hath all too short a date...

How is this gonna help me to write correct English, when we are fed with wrong grammatic? Even now after >10 years and a lot of practice on business trips with native English speaking customers etc. I don't get the vocabulary and grammatic stuff right. Not to mention the pronunciation. After the first sentence and in NY directly after telling the taxi driver where I want to go I hear: "Ahh, you're from Germany?" *grrr* Most taxi drivers are trained of course.


But it's not a particular German problem. I witness this everywhere. For instance in Spain I especially picked a young guy to ask for next the tram station: "No habla ingles". Maybe he didn't want to, but that actually happened to me a lot. Worst country from my experience is Japan. When you're lucky and they remember some english from school it is only some phrases, but no understanding of the language at all.

I think it is time for an synthetic world language everyone has to speak fluently. ;-)