Jorn

I use it for helping me learn German but only for explaining things like grammatical rules, concepts, or word uses.

Do not ask it to translate or write something for you. It will make lots of grammatical mistakes. I find that it often misgenders or uses the wrong case for nouns in a sentence.

Haha. I read that a lot, but it’s honestly not so bad as long as you stay away from the Hauptbahnhof. That area is truly awful.

Vielen Dank! We really enjoy living here and we are working hard to settle here permanently.

As an American we had the standard 90 day visitor visa, which is basically just proven by showing the stamp you get on your passport when you enter Germany. I recommend applying for your next Visa immediately. Our wait time for an appointment was just short of 90 days. We did the language learning Visa which is good for up to one year and allows you to work up to 20 hours per week. They can’t really track that if you have a remote foreign job, it just hinders you from getting full-time employment in Germany. If you go this route, you can find a job that will sponsor you for a work visa or you can apply for the new Opportunity/Chance Card (Chancenkarte) which is up to a year long “job seeker visa”. If you have an accredited degree then you are eligible, otherwise there is a point system for things like language, age, finances, etc. The Chance Card wait time is pretty long so keep that in mind when planning.

The non-working visas also require you to have €992 per month in a “blocked account” that will be disbursed to you each month for living expenses. If you aren’t working, you’ll need private health insurance. Ours is €50 per person per month and is far better than the Kaiser Permanente insurance that we paid $550 a month for in the US.

I’ve been asking myself that question for years. My wife and I thought the best solution for us was to leave the country. We don’t have a good outlook for the future of the US. We moved to Germany last spring and have been enjoying a healthier and better quality of life. It’s not easy but it is very rewarding. The cost of living here is less than half of what we were paying in the US. Groceries, rent, utilities, insurance, everything is cheaper except eating out at restaurants (that costs pretty much the same). For what it’s worth, we moved from Denver to Frankfurt.

Yes. In Germany it’s called Soja sauce. Same thing.

I used to be an Operations Manager at a machine shop with 150 employees and a Program Manager at another places with 250 employees. Both had 5am starts. In my experience, the biggest factor was support for the billable staff. You have direct labor employees; these are the people who run machines and fabricate products. Then there are indirect employees that support the direct employees; like purchasing, planning/scheduling, management, customer service, quality, etc. Most manufacturers with a 5am start time are running multiple shifts of direct labor. The indirect employees usually don’t start until 7-8am and overlap both shifts to have some support for both day and night shift.

Manufacturers that run one shift(like my current job) usually start later. We start at 7am but allow people to flex their start time for kids, etc.