Ich unterrichte Englisch für Schüler*innen an Gymnasien, Realschulen und Fachschulen sowie für Studierende an Universitäten.

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• How is it that you speak this language fluently? Is this related to your background, or did a teacher once awaken your passion for it?

  I speak English fluently because it is my mother tongue. I was raised in Johannesburg, South Africa, which has 11 official home languages! The two languages spoken by most black South Africans are Zulu and Sotho, which I can also speak a little. I also speak fluent Afrikaans, which is a dialect of Dutch (the Dutch occupied the Cape from the mid-1600s). Most people think it's only white South Africans who speak Afrikaans, but that's incorrect. More than 60% of Afrikaans speakers are people of colour. From the 1820s, the British took control of the region, and thousands of English settlers came. Almost everyone in South Africa, no matter what their mother tongue, can speak English. It has become the lingua franca of the country.
  
  That's a short historical context. My background is that I grew up in apartheid South Africa. My parents were the descendants of English settlers and our family was opposed to apartheid. As a teenager, I used to go into the townships to protest against apartheid. Most whites were terrified of places like Soweto, but I was always welcomed with great warmth and hospitality. To this day some of my closest friends are people I met during those struggle days.
  
  I was privileged to have a good education and my most transformative years were during my time as a student at Rhodes University. I studied English and Drama as my major subjects. I wrote for the student newspaper and we were often raided by the police for our anti-apartheid statements, but we would phone everyone and soon the whole street outside would be full of students singing freedom songs, and eventually the police just left.
  
  At university I had the honour of having two guest-lecturers who later became Nobel laureates: Nadine Gordimer was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1991, and J.M. Coetzee in 2003. My English professor was the legendary Guy Butler, and it was from him that I developed a profound love for drama, especially Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw, Harold Pinter, and Tom Stoppard. I also discovered the Germans: Goethe, Brecht, and later, Wedekind and Jelinek. My favourite poets are TS Eliot in English, especially The Waste Land, and Rainer Maria Rilke in German, especially the Duino Elegies.
  
  So that's my background. I moved to Germany in 2019 for personal reasons. Because I have dual citizenship (Italian and South African) I have the right to live and work in Europe. I love teaching English because it's the lingua franca of Europe. Especially in times like these, it's vital that we stand together as Europeans. Regardless of what American politicians say, I do not believe Europe is in decline. I believe our values, our democracy, our principles are a vital flame on the global stage. I consult to the European Commission in Brussels and do specialist work, writing reports and assessments in English, because I believe in the importance of unity in the EU, and the values of Europe.
  
  I am a journalist and a documentary filmmaker. I'm still active writing and filming. I have a regular substack in which I write articles about the environment.
  
  Here are examples of two short documentary films that I filmed and edited, one in Cape Town and one in Munich:

• Name one person, whether living, historical or fictional, who best represents this culture for you!

  That would have to be the immortal bard, William Shakespeare! He said things that have become part of the fabric of our culture. He wrote about eternal themes - love, betrayal, power, destiny.
  
  Hamlet's 'To be, or not to be, that is the question. Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them,' taught us about the destructive nature of revenge, the paralysis of overthinking, the complexity of human morality.
  
  Macbeth's 'Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day, to the last syllable of recorded time; and all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing,' shows how a life of immoral ambition and betrayal, results in despair and hopelessness.
  
  There are many others:
  
  Love and relationships: 'Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, and therefore is winged Cupid painted blind.'
  *A Midsummer Night's Dream)
  
  Power: 'Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.' (Henry IV, Part 2)
  
  Destiny and Free Will: 'Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.' (Twelfth Night)
  
  And lines like these, which have become a part not just of English, but are also used as sayings in German and many other languages:
  
  'To thine own self be true.' (Hamlet)
  'The lady doth protest too much.' (Hamlet)
  'Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears.' (Julius Caesar)
  'Brevity is the soul of wit.' (Hamlet)
  'What's in a name? That which we call a rose, by any other word would smell as sweet.' (Romeo and Juliet)

• In the language you teach, is there a word, expression, tradition, or typical behavior that particularly impresses or amuses you?

  For German speakers, English at first sight appears simple - there are no cases and genders - but it can often be confusing, because many words are not pronounced the way they are spelled.
  
  There are words like minute and bow that have the same spelling but different meanings and pronunciations, depending on the context!
  (I will be with you in a minute. It was so tiny, so minute, that you needed a microscope. She was a great archer - very good with a bow and arrow. The ship's bow is at the opposite end to the stern.)
  
  But without doubt, it is gh in various words that non-L1 speakers find most confusing, because it is pronounced in so many different ways!
  
  You have a hard g, like ghost, then an f sound like cough and laugh, and then a p sound like hiccough.
  
  The playwright George Bernard Shaw famously created the artificial word ghoti for fish:
  "gh" pronounced as /f/ as in the word tough.
  "o" pronounced as /ɪ as in the word women.
  "ti" pronounced as /ʃ (the "sh" sound) as in the word nation.

• Why do you think it is so important to master this language (whether for school/university, career, or personal reasons)?

  In the past, Latin was the lingua franca of Europe. Now it is English. In fact, English has become the lingua franca of the world. 1.5 billion people speak English, most of them as a second language. It has become the language of business, science and online communication.
  
  Particularly in Europe and the Americas, it is the default language of communication for bodies like the EU and the UN. It connects people from different countries, opens career opportunities and provides access to global information and cultural exchange.

• What is the particular difficulty in learning this language, or why is it especially worthwhile?

  In Germany, Austria, Scandinavia and parts of Switzerland and Belgium, English is actually pretty straightforward because it's essentially a Germanic language. The main difficulties are because it's not only Germanic. English has also been heavily influenced by Latin, Greek, Old Norse, French and Celtic. That means, as mentioned above, that it has many inconsistent pronunciations and spellings.
  
  Germans particularly struggle with the th sound because it doesn't exist in German (think, there, throw). They also confuse the pronunciation of v and w because they are pronounced the opposite way around in English (saying wary for very and vurd for word). We use the present progressive instead of the present simple (not I go, but I am going). We use a lot of phrasal verbs and idioms like 'Take off your clothes', or 'Set up the camera.' which can be illogical to German and many other non-L1 speakers.
  
  Of course it's worthwhile to know English - it's definitely worth the effort! See 4 above - it's a major door-opener to anyone wanting to grow their career and broaden their knowledge. Most of the stuff on the internet is in English.

• Is there an anecdote from your professional life or school days related to this language that you would like to tell us about?

  I think when I first came to Germany I thought people were obsessed with sex, because they kept saying how lustig things were!
  I finally figured out that lustig means funny or amusing, or fun, and it's not really about lust at all!
  
  My browser often mistranslated english words like gift or used into poison or wanted, like, Is this a gift? would appear auf Deutsch as Ist das Gift? (poison), or Needed Cars instead of Used Cars.
  
  I used to get totally confused by the many false friends:
  I'd ask for a beer and I thought the bartender was telling me to go to hell!
  Then I worked out that hell means clear (or bright), not a place of eternal damnation!
  
  It took me a long time to work out that 'Es ist mir egal' has nothing to do with meaning it equals anything, but it meant 'It doesn't matter.'

• Help us get to know you a little better and tell us a little more about your previous travels and/or stays abroad (in relation to the language you teach or in general).

  I've attached my CV which should give you some background. I have a continual sense that I'm living on the edge of chaos. As a writer, I think deeply about cultural issues, the environment and the human predicament. You'll see that in my substack post above.
  
  As an African, I'm connected to wild spaces, wild animals, big skies. But there's an underlying sense of chaos that's impossible to ignore. One of the reasons I left South Africa was the heartbreaking inequality. It is the most unequal society in the world.
  
  Everything we fought for before democracy has not been delivered. The townships are still places of extreme poverty. The ANC's slogan of 'A better life for all' has become hollow and meaningless because of the corruption of power. The poor are worse off. State schools and public hospitals are barely functional. One is constantly aware of the line from W.B. Yeats' poem: Things fall apart. The centre cannot hold.
  
  My parents could not have children, and I was adopted. I did an analysis of my DNA. I'm genetically German. I found who my birth mother was. She has sadly passed away, but her name was Ingrid Karge, and before I was given away for adoption as an infant, she named me Joachim Karge. I found her birth certificate. She was born in Berlin.
  
  So I feel very rooted to this country and I love the language. I've finished my Goethe Institut German B1 and next year I'm doing B2 at the local VHS.
  
  Germans complain about their country and grumble about their politicians. But I'm from Africa.
  
  I see the difference - how available German politicians are, to appear on TV and be grilled by journalists, and be held accountable. That never happens in South Africa.
  
  I see how little crime there is.
  
  Compared to Africa, society here is mostly middle-class. In Johannesburg, at virtually every traffic light there are people begging for food, for work, for dignity.
  
  The Germans are famously hard-working - I love that. In South Africa our infrastructure is falling apart because government officials (Beampte) do no work. They were appointed because of political affiliation. Most have no training, no education, and cannot do the job, so they do nothing, but they still take home a pay-check at the end of every month.
  
  To a South African, at first sight, Bavarians appear to be a grumpy lot, because they don't smile as readily as we do. But my experience is that once a Bavarian becomes your friend, he is loyal and has your back. It takes longer to make friends, but it's deeper.
  
  We are, in Europe, also living on the edge of chaos. The world is changing. Trump. Global warming. Ukraine. That's why I believe, more than ever, the values enshrined in most EU member-states' constitutions, of liberty, democracy, rule of law, freedom of the press: these things matter.
  
  We are not a sub-continent in decline. We are a collection of some of the planet's oldest, most influential economies and cultures. Yes, we've made mistakes. Plenty.
  
  But right now, what Europe stands for, regardless of the growth of extremism, is important. We matter. The rest of the world is looking to us for some signs of hope in those values. How we handle things now, will have profound impact in the near future.

• In short: What makes you a superprof? (in addition to successfully mastering several languages…)

  This is going to sound a bit weird, but until I started teaching English, I never knew how much fun I'd have.
  
  Most of my life I've been a filmmaker and journalist. I'm now 67. I'm in ridiculously good health, I still do open water and cold water swimming, hiking, skiing. I am blessed to have a wife (a born-and-bred Münchnerin) who I probably don't deserve, but whom I love with my whole heart. So I felt it was time to give back, and teaching English is my way of doing it.
  
  I wanted to pass on my love for English to people learning the language. And it appears that I'm rather good at it. My learners and their parents really make me feel part of their household. The students enjoy the way I teach, and I'm getting results. Their English is improving. Some of my students are now getting top marks in school. I find that incredibly rewarding!