I was thinking about that when I was dropping my 6 year old off at some hobbies earlier - it’s pretty much expected to have learned how to ride a bicycle before starting school, and it massively expands the area you can go to by yourself. When she went to school by bicycle she can easily make a detour via a shop to spend some pocket money before coming home, while by foot that’d be rather time consuming.
Quite a lot of friends from outside of Europe either can’t ride a bicycle, or were learning it as adult after moving here, though.
edit: the high number of replies mentioning “swimming” made me realize that I had that filed as a basic skill pretty much everybody has - probably due to swimming lessons being a mandatory part of school education here.
For me it was mainly watching films and tv shows in english. I’ve always preferred the original audio on anything, really. So it motivated me a good bit to become more fluent.
The only german dub I didn’t hate was Breaking Bads’, and even then I wasn’t overly fond of it.
Can’t get over english cartoons dubs.
Ben10, Avatar ATLA and spongebob sound so much worse in english compared to german to my ears. Could not enjoy it.
Live action movies are usually equal or only slightly worse regarding original vs dubbed german.
Now that I think about it, there is one that’s infinitely better in German, and that’s The Emperors’ new Groove
Legendary
So let me specify, I prefer the original if it’s live action
