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Same reason: It's not part of the phoneme inventory. German doesn't have the /eɪ/ sound naturally, so a German speaker will not hear the difference between long e and ei and will also not be able to reproduce it.Speaking of difficult sounds, I am not sure why the sound /eɪ/ (e.g. as in "cake") seems to give so much trouble to many people whose native language is not English. At my previous job I had several co-workers from Italy and France, and a couple from Germany and Austria, and they usually pronounced the names "Craig" and "Greg", of two actual colleagues, in the same way, which occasionally created misunderstandings. I am not sure why it's so difficult. After all it's just "e" followed by "i".
By the same token, you could ask why English speakers cannot just pronounce the long e in Latin re, but why they always turn it into "ray".
It is not difficult to learn if you do some dedicated speech training, but it is difficult to hear, understand and reproduce if your only reference is your native languange (and no other speech training).
And don't call English lessons at school speech training. The committed few will get these kinds of things with training outside school (like youtube) or with an incredible amount of talent ... or with both. But it will pass most people entirely.
What is interesting is that children up to a certain age (I think 9 to about 15 months) manage to distinguish these kinds of sounds. But once their native language has sort of been programmed into their brains, they fail to distinguish any kinds of allophones or foreign sounds that they had previously been able to recognise.