Prof. Dr. Thorsten Jungmann (last updated 2025-08-20)
Ideally, you have learned the following skills at school and can apply them confidently:
- Speaking
- Listening comprehension
- Reading and understanding
- Writing clearly and correctly
The linguistic side of engineering should not be underestimated.
First: imagine you are in a country whose language you do not understand. Then, even as a competent specialist, you will find it difficult to follow people’s conversations and to contribute. Accordingly, knowledge of English is of great importance for electrical engineering, in this course and in internationally operating companies.
Second: in your later professional life, your use of technical language will quite often decide whether you are ‘taken seriously’ or whether you are dismissed as an academic (in the sense of ‘has no idea about practice anyway’).
All the more important, then, that you know, for example:
- Current flows.
- Voltage is applied between two points or drops across a component.
- Power is absorbed, converted or delivered.
- Energy is only ‘consumed’ in colloquial language, but not in the technical sense, because it is always conserved and is merely converted into other forms of energy.
Important!
If you know of or notice any gaps here, acquire the missing competences urgently and very soon in order to avoid problems!
Since many companies in Germany work in German, the German language is also important for engineers in addition to English!