«The decision to learn a foreign language is to me an act of friendship. It is indeed a holding out of the hand. It’s not just a route to negotiation. It’s also to get to know you better, to draw closer to you and your culture, your social manners and your way of thinking. And the decision to teach a foreign language is an act of commitment, generosity and mediation.»

I took a year of German in graduate school so I could read German philosophical texts. On thing that really struck me about the language is that the main verb in a sentence goes at the end. So a German sentence translated word-for-word into English would be something like "I to the store in my car went."

Also I remember learning that German philosophy students prefer to read the English translation of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason because it broke up the impossibly long sentences of the original.

I like German because it has own words for many things (including, for example, radio and television).

Learning German, he says, is particularly useful when applying oneself to the task of understanding the Germans, which he seems to be implying may be quite soon something of interest to (con and noncon) tinental Europe.