在现代语言文学系
Acquiring a second language will enrich your life and open up many career opportunities. Whether your goals include visiting the castles and beer gardens of Europe, enjoying a performance of Mozart's Magic Flute in the original, watching a film by Wim Wenders, rediscovering your heritage, reading the works of Wittgenstein, delving into the legacy of the Cold War, analyzing Freud or embarking on an international career in business, commerce or finance, learning German is a definite asset. The modern German language was born in the 16th century when two groups of dialects known as Frankish and Alemannic merged into a single language. As a result of the wide circulation of Martin Luther's German translation of the Bible (1534), the new language quickly grew in influence and prestige.<br><br>First taught as a language of culture, German was the mother tongue of many brilliant writers such as Goethe, Schiller, Kafka, Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht and Gnter Grass and many well-known composers such as Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, Wagner and Mahler. From the 18th century onwards, German has been at the forefront of intellectual inquiry, German-speaking intellectuals having shaped the Humanities with philosophers such as Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche and Heidegger, political thinkers such as Marx, Engels, Nietzsche and Hannah Arendt, psychoanalysts such as Freud and Jung and philologists (linguists) such as Humboldt, Schlegel, Schleicher and Grimm.