22
votes
Germany ends ban on dual citizenship and reduces the number of years of residency required for naturalisation
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- Title
- Labour-hungry Germany to ease citizenship path despite migration rows
- Authors
- Thomas Escritt
- Published
- Jan 19 2024
- Word count
- 439 words
I honestly wasn't expecting this one to pass after they postponed it. The current conflict in Gaza has definitely caused the existing anti-immigrant sentiment here to flare up considerably.
This law will actually make me eligible to apply for German citizenship once it comes into effect (assuming that I can pass the language and citizenship tests). Setting myself aside, though, this is objectively a good thing for the millions of immigrants here.
I think there's some truth to the complaints about "adding to the burden migration is placing on public services", but only because the Ausländerbehörde has already been fundamentally broken in terms of staffing and funding for longer than I've lived here. It's well-known in immigrant communities that the only way to actually get them to process your citizenship application within anything less than years is to hire a lawyer to threaten them with legal action for not doing things in a timely enough manner. German citizens have no need to interact with the Ausländerbehörde as a result politicians seem to have little incentive to improve its funding or staffing. honestly one of the most inhumane bureaucratic experiences in all of Germany -- and Germany is a country full of frustrating bureaucracy elsewhere. While I'm sure this law change will increase their burden, it's already so bad that I can't see it actually being worse for those of us unfortunate enough to have to interact with it.
Shoutout to Reuters for pushing back on the bullshit conservative rhetoric regarding German Turks:
Of course now that this has passed I have no excuse not to sign up for intensive German language courses to finally put my language skills over the required threshold rather than hovering just below it for years like I have been 😅 Even if my wife and I later decide to move to her home country , my getting German citizenship would also make that objectively easier for us.
German is a nice language, even if the grammar is really beyond horrible. One suggestion I would make is to take a course you find interesting at a Volkshofschule – one summer holiday I went to a course on art (where I was the only person under 60) where a quite excitable academic lectured us about renaissance art which was (surpisingly given that I was supposed to be on another course which was cancelled) actually very interesting – because it helps with the immersion in the language.
I don't actually mind the grammar much tbqh, but I'm horrible at memorizing vocabulary and this has really limited my ability to communicate. I think my local Volkshochschule has courses but they're part of an "integration course" package (which used to be required for citizenship), so I'll have to see if they change the structure or something as a result of this law.
I'm sure you already are familiar with this, but intensively consuming music, television, film and videogames in his target languages has helped my husband a lot. He swears by Anki flashcard app for vocab drill.
I've gained some good vocab from playing some good German point and click adventure games! Even if I have English subtitles, I still learn a fair bit. But with music and tv/film I have a tendency to zone out if I don't understand it (or sometimes if I do... ADHD's a bitch).
What I really need is some external force/structure to get me to actually do any of this. So signing up for a formal class again is probably in the cards for me.
At least here, Steam is pretty good about offering subtitles and frequently voice in many languages for video games.
Good luck
I suppose I'm also luckily that Germans love dubbing things and is one of the more popular languages to get games and such translated into it.
Have you tried using a flashcard program (e.g. Anki)? I find it really hard to remember vocab if I don't consciously practice recalling definitions, and Anki really helped me to crack it in that regard.
I've heard good things about Anki from friends and classmates, but in general I struggle to get flashcards and other similar methods to stick. Partially it's that I find flashcards painfully boring and thus I struggle to make myself review them. But it's also partially that I think I retain things better when I have to use/read them in some more practical context.