Obviously as a software engineer it would be ridiculous to not at least read English, but I know for a fact there's great German language forums and learning resources out there. I imagine there exist programmers out there working in some deep and dark VW or Siemens lab that have been able to work for years without reading a full English sentence.
I'm pretty sure Berlin is also the only city (or one of very few) in Germany where you can actually live and work happily and productively without learning German.
It wasn’t until you said this that I considered my motivation to learn Japanese as part of this conversation. My whole reason for doing so was for better appreciation of anime.
It was incredible, the accent was impeccable.
...and MTV, and the Brits the music to go with it! That's how I learned English as a teenager anyway.
Having said that, between roughly 1850 and the end of the second World War it was considered necessary for engineers and scientists in the UK and USA at least to know German because of the German's achievements in science and technology (especially chemistry) and the political and economic power of the various central European states and empires controlled by German speaking elites. Gaining a competitive advantage over your peers and expanding your knowledge has always been a good incentive to learn another language independent of wanting to learn what your occupiers are saying.
German kids watched TV with dubs because their network execs deemed it worth it, I don't think that was very political either.
Most people really learn English because of economics. American companies are big trade partners, customers and of course, employers.
Many of the others learn it for cultural reasons, as said. Cartoons, movies, TV series, songs, etc.
This summarizes. In India the union government is trying to push Hindi as the national language while the state governments are pushing back. This has been going for 70 years.
The interesting change is the due to jobs in south India north Indian state migrant workers moved to southern states. Their kids who go public school score higher in the native language classes than the native kids. This applies only for the low income migrant workers. The white collar job workers send their kids to private school and still learn Hindi.
In South India at least English is given more importance than the regional language.
PS: To those who are unaware of India, India has 23 officially recognized languages
There is an enormous economic incentive to do business in English as it gives you access to these huge markets with wealthy customers. Additionally, a lot of content is published by English speakers, which re-enforces the need to learn English. Finally because pretty much every country does at least some business in English, it's also the most common language for any two countries that wish to engage with each other.
I'm actually Dutch but I live in Germany. While I speak a little bit of German, my English is far better. I don't actually need German to do business in Berlin; so I don't use it a lot I have no economic incentive to learn it. There's a critical mass of foreigners here that mostly speak English far better than they speak German. And while some Germans don't like that, a lot of them don't mind it and actually move to Berlin because they speak English and because is so international. You see this dynamic in a lot of economically important cities across the world. As soon as you get any concentration of foreigners living in them, English becomes an important language to the point where the locals start using English to be able to keep up.