ECB President Christine Lagarde Is Trying to Learn German

(Bloomberg) -- European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde is attempting an endeavor possibly as daunting as reigniting inflation in the euro area: Learning German.

It’s understandable that the region’s new monetary chief, an internationally minded Frenchwoman now based at the ECB’s headquarters in Frankfurt, might want to communicate in the first language of her latest home. Not only is German the mother tongue of a quarter of the currency bloc’s population, but policies such as negative interest rates haven’t gone down well in Europe’s biggest economy, and being able to explain them more directly might help.

“It is a huge asset if you can communicate locally,” said Philipp Hildebrand, vice Chairman of Blackrock and a former president of the central bank of Switzerland, which has four official languages, including German. “By and large, many Germans feel like the ECB did not communicate sufficiently.”

If this is Lagarde’s New Year Resolution, it’s a formidable one. Each noun has one of three genders to be memorized -- compared with two in French -- with adjectival endings to match. Verbs can come at the end of the sentence, and many are irregular.

The American author Mark Twain was driven to craft an 1880 essay on “The Awful German Language” after the ordeal of trying to get to grips with it.

“The inventor of the language seems to have taken pleasure in complicating it in every way he could think of,” he wrote.

The “alphabetical processions” of compound nouns were one of Twain’s frustrations. There are a few jumbles Lagarde is likely to encounter, such as Eigenmittelanforderungen -- capital requirements for banks -- or Anleihekaufprogramm, the term for quantitative easing.

The president, who turns 64 on Jan. 1, appears to relish the challenge. She told lawmakers this month that she faces an “accelerated” learning curve that involves learning both German and the language of central banking.

Aside from getting about the city though, she didn’t explain how she plans to achieve her goal. Just getting to the point of being able to have an elementary conversation about daily life requires 240 hours of lessons, according to the Goethe Institut, a public-funded network of colleges which specializes in teaching the language.

Lagarde’s predecessors had a mixed track record on the matter. The ECB’s first president, Wim Duisenberg of the Netherlands, spoke German before moving to Frankfurt. France’s Jean-Claude Trichet made an effort, and credited the experience with helping him “gain a profound understanding” of how people think in Germany.

“The structure of a language also reveals patterns of argument,” he told magazine Der Spiegel in 2005. “It’s no coincidence that numerous great philosophers are Germans.”

Trichet made enough progress to deliver a speech in German in 2009 marking 10 years of the euro. Later that year, he told a reporter that he was very happy with how it had been received by the audience. Still, he said, German is “difficult.”

His successor, Italy’s Mario Draghi, whose negative rates and bond-buying programs led to him being demonized in some sections of the German media, never mastered the language in eight years as president. Perhaps his most famous attempt was the phrase “nein zu allem” -- no to everything -- which he pointedly used in 2012 and again in 2016 to criticize resistance to his radical policies.

Lagarde says she won’t be deterred by the difficulties. When Joachim Schuster, a German lawmaker in the European Parliament, questioned her in his native tongue, she had a ready response.

“One day, maybe, I’ll be able to answer in German.”

--With assistance from Jana Randow.

To contact the reporters on this story: Catherine Bosley in Zurich at cbosley1@bloomberg.net;Zoe Schneeweiss in London at zschneeweiss@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Fergal O'Brien at fobrien@bloomberg.net, Paul Gordon

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