Guenther Oettinger is the new European Commissioner (don't really know the English word for "EU-Kommissar") and as you can hear, he's coming from Germany. At the beginning of the video, he states that English is going to be the working language and that everbody has to speak and to understand English nowadays. Well, you can judge now by yourself if such an important person lives up to his own demands. (I'm also coming from Germany so it's twice as funny, lol!)

Oh my ... that's hilarious! I'm not good at actually speaking the language either, but that's just bad.

How can they put someone with such lacking language skills in a position like that?!

ummm...his english didnt sound that bad to me. i dont see the problem....?

I don't see where the problem is?

Every movie we Americans have with Germans speaking English use that kind of accent. Heck, look at our own governor of California. If he doesn't have a horrible English accent, I don't know who does.

Horribad English accents happen all the time. Fran Drescher, Paul Purdohme, Jerry Sienfield, people from Minnesota, ect. I don't see why anyone would get bent out of shape about some German guy having a heavy German accent. I would assume that if I went to Germany and learned German, that everyone there would have a hard time understanding my American accent for German. English is used too broadly to get offended by someone not speaking it properly...Its the world's trade language, so your not always going to get a native speaker.

He's really not that bad. You can't expect somebody whose second language is English to speak in a perfect posh Buckingham accent.

I don't think anyone would want him to have a Buckingham accent :-p

In fact, is there even an 'English' accent? The steriotypical American-English accent is a far cry from English-English accents. Even then, like the UK, we have about 20 flavors of accents similarly to the divide between Buckingham and Scottish accents.

I mean, growing up in the US, you meet and deal with caucasians that have a dozen or so accents that aren't native to England or Australia. So its kind of odd when someone argues 'bad' English accent when its merely a regional thing.

Not a Buckingham accent, perhaps, but if English is going to be the official language of the European Commission, it might as well be spoken properly. It would be ideal if his accent was lighter and more understandable, but he's made the effort to learn English at least.

And hopefully his English will improve, because looking at some parts of the video, he actually borders on non-understandable.

Didn't sound too bad... I've heard a lot worse, from people who actually live in England.

Yeah...he's better than Gordon Brown