"It's getting worse," says Massimo. Because the Italian municipality, where the self-employed handyman works, is practically bankrupt, Massimo usually gets paid months late. Sometimes it can even take a year before he gets paid. But he still has to buy materials and pay his taxes immediately, often on credit.
Given his situation Massimo has little desire to stay in Italy. Instead he wants to try his luck up north. "I am going to Germany," he says in broken German. Massimo wants to go to Ulm, a southern German city where he has relatives. He wants to work there and earn more money than he can at home. But there's just one small problem: he has to learn German. "It is hard," he moans in German, but he says he'll get there.
Like Massimo, thousands of Italians are struggling to learn German at the moment. They find the grammar as perplexing as the tongue-twisting pronunciation. Italians simply cannot say words like "Schleswig-Holstein," a northern German state, or "Bordsteinkante," meaning curbside. Even Italian television racing experts stumble over the name of Formula 1 driver Michael Schumacher, who is idolized in the country.
Despite its challenges, learning German, long scorned, is now suddenly popular at schools and universities, at branches of the Goethe Institute cultural association or in private language schools. More than 400,000 Italian middle and high school students are now choosing German as a second foreign language. In 2011, the number of people studying German jumped 18 percent and this year it's likely to be an even larger increase. French and Spanish, on the other hand, are on a downward trend.
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