12 ms·

Not in most of Western and Central Europe. Everyone speaks great English. It actually can be a problem because most people switch to English as soon as they re

by 14u2c 2mo ago

Not in most of Western and Central Europe. Everyone speaks great English. It actually can be a problem because most people switch to English as soon as they realize your are not a native speaker, which can make learning harder.

aleph_minus_one 2mo ago
> Not in most of Western and Central Europe. Everyone speaks great English. For sure not in France and Spain (outside of tourist areas).
- throwaway2037 2mo ago
  You beat me to it! This is the classic HN reply. Even in Paris or Milan, as soon as you leave the central areas, most people will speak little English and are happy to allow you to practice your poor French/Italian with them!
  - 21asdffdsa12 2mo ago
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYYpTfx1ey8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYYpTfx1ey8
  - bloppe 2mo ago
    I'm constantly amazed at how far I can get in Portugal or Italy speaking only Spanish. They're different languages but you can make it work well enough in pretty much every situation I've been in.
    - vidarh 2mo ago
      To butcher a old quote about English: Spanish is just badly pronounced Italian, after all ;)
    - throwaway2037 2mo ago
      I recall reading an autobiography by US Supreme Court justice Sonia Sotomayor. She used to represent Fendi, the Italian fashion brand, when there were suing for copyright infringement (counterfeit goods). She would speak Spanish and the Fendi senior execs would speak Italian and they understood each other well enough. That was a real a-ha moment for me!
      - nunez 2mo ago
        My grandmother had this experience when she was still alive. While waiting for us to shop for stuff at the mall, she struck up a conversation with an older Italian lady. She only knew Italian; my grandmother only knew Spanish. They made it work!
- vidarh 2mo ago
  I agree not everyone, but it has changed dramatically in at least France as well in the last 30 years. First time I went to France, most people would not switch to English even in the middle of Paris, often even if they knew English unless they saw no other way out. More recently, with much better French, I've had people impatiently switching to English the moment I was struggled to find the right word. There certainly is a shift, though, when you get outside the tourist areas. E.g. in Nice, you can pinpoint it almost by street. Cross under the railway in the city centre and move into Liberation, for example, and you will immediately find some staff that are unable or unwilling to speak English, and many who at least won't switch unless you ask. But it's also not surprising given how abrupt the number of tourists fall off...
testing22321 2mo ago
> Not in most of Western and Central Europe. Everyone speaks great English You are completely forgetting the people trying to move there who don’t speak English OR the native language
- aveao 2mo ago
  For my german work visa in 2022, I had to either give proof of sufficient german knowledge, or a letter from my employer confirming the job would be in english. "People who don't speak english or native language" does not represent the people moving for work to germany. Most family reunion routes at least require A1 german as well (which is super easy to pass, but is scary enough for some anyways).
eptcyka 2mo ago
Only if you live in metropolitan cities.
aveao 2mo ago
This isn't really true. I've lived in both Munich and Hamburg now, and you 100% need some amount of german to navigate life, many people do not in fact have conversational-level english. I often say that the common paths tend to be easy to navigate in english (e.g. booking a train ticket, getting a phone line), but the adjacent flows (e.g. filing a refund request for your unfulfilled seat reservation, cancelling your phone contract) often require talking to someone in german. A doctor may be marked as speaking english, but that doesn't mean that their reception speaks english. Berlin may be a different story within Germany, and then there's the entirety of e.g. Netherlands, but I know that the situation in France isn't better than here. --- That said, B1 is a difficult level within german. Being able to converse fluently enough in not-quite-correct german -which is enough for getting through day to day life- is not necessarily enough to pass the test, and you really need to crunch through memorizing the grammatical gender of thousands of words, alongside getting really good at applying them in various grammatical forms (e.g. declensions vary for the same word based on how it's used).
marcus_holmes 2mo ago
This was my experience. I lived for almost four years in Berlin, and was trying to learn German (I got to A2, which isn't much). But actually getting experience/immersion in German is difficult in Berlin - everyone under the age of 50 speaks good English and switched to that as soon as my first badly-conjugated sentence left my mouth. I worked for two German companies while I was there, and the entire tech team in both companies did everything in English. This is normal there. In one of them, the (German) CEO gave a townhall speech to the entire company (~1000 employees) in English. So yes, it's very understandable for the German government to say "you must be at least B1 to live here" but that doesn't recognise the fact that it is perfectly possible to actually live and work in Berlin with no German at all. It's different in other German cities, apparently. If we'd moved to Munich or Cologne I would have had more pressure to learn German, and also more exposure to it and more immersion which would have helped learn it.
- throwaway2037 2mo ago
  Did you ask if you can move to a different city and work remotely? Even if only 1-2 years, it might really help to boost your German. Moving to Dresden, Hanover, or Hamburg would help. (German HNers can probably recommend a bunch of small cities 1-2 hours away by train/car from Berlin that will use much more German language!) You could come to the office once a week. Another tip: Always start the conversation in German. If the person switches to English, ask them politely to speak German, and explain that you are studying German. My parents did similar when they moved to the Netherlands 50 years ago. The local shopkeepers were eager to practice English with my parents, but my parents were also eager to practice their Dutch.
  - marcus_holmes 2mo ago
    That's really good advice, but I found it hard to put into practice because my German was so bad. And German isn't a language you can just hammer out a badly-formed sentence in; word position is less important than conjugation, so if you get the conjugation wrong it makes no sense at all to the listener. I did try this a few times, but everyone lost patience with the painful butchering of their language when they realised their English was a lot better than my German. I would have moved city, but a: COVID b: my wife also had a job there c: I really loved Berlin and really enjoyed living there
stnikolauswagne 2mo ago
There is some sort of weird phenomenon that I cant quite put to words, but the core is: While there is a big chunk of the native german population speaking great english there is a subset of (often) service workers who... dont. Had multiple furniture movers come through my house the last few weeks, the only way to communicate with them was broken german, since they had no english skills and my (croatian? serbian?) skills were zero. At one point I ended up in the weirdest situation of my live were i translated the german instructions from the phone rep into english to the shift lead of the moving company so he could then give them in the native language to the movers.
- bulbar 2mo ago
  That's basically why you should learn the language of the country you live in. Blaming people for not speaking English in Germany is pretty weird. How about learning German instead?
  - fransje26 2mo ago
    > Blaming people for not speaking English in Germany is pretty weird. How about learning German instead? As the poster wrote: >> At one point I ended up in the weirdest situation of my live were i translated the german instructions from the phone rep into english [..] which implies that he does, in fact, speak German. The movers did not, though.
  - stnikolauswagne 2mo ago
    I speak german as a mothertongue and fluent english, and I had massive troubles communicating in my own home.
    - bulbar 2mo ago
      I see, that wasn't clear to me from what you wrote.

by 14u2c 2mo ago

aleph_minus_one 2mo ago

> Not in most of Western and Central Europe. Everyone speaks great English. For sure not in France and Spain (outside of tourist areas).

throwaway2037 2mo ago
You beat me to it! This is the classic HN reply. Even in Paris or Milan, as soon as you leave the central areas, most people will speak little English and are happy to allow you to practice your poor French/Italian with them!
- 21asdffdsa12 2mo ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYYpTfx1ey8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYYpTfx1ey8
- bloppe 2mo ago
  I'm constantly amazed at how far I can get in Portugal or Italy speaking only Spanish. They're different languages but you can make it work well enough in pretty much every situation I've been in.
  - vidarh 2mo ago
    To butcher a old quote about English: Spanish is just badly pronounced Italian, after all ;)
  - throwaway2037 2mo ago
    I recall reading an autobiography by US Supreme Court justice Sonia Sotomayor. She used to represent Fendi, the Italian fashion brand, when there were suing for copyright infringement (counterfeit goods). She would speak Spanish and the Fendi senior execs would speak Italian and they understood each other well enough. That was a real a-ha moment for me!
    - nunez 2mo ago
      My grandmother had this experience when she was still alive. While waiting for us to shop for stuff at the mall, she struck up a conversation with an older Italian lady. She only knew Italian; my grandmother only knew Spanish. They made it work!
vidarh 2mo ago
I agree not everyone, but it has changed dramatically in at least France as well in the last 30 years. First time I went to France, most people would not switch to English even in the middle of Paris, often even if they knew English unless they saw no other way out. More recently, with much better French, I've had people impatiently switching to English the moment I was struggled to find the right word. There certainly is a shift, though, when you get outside the tourist areas. E.g. in Nice, you can pinpoint it almost by street. Cross under the railway in the city centre and move into Liberation, for example, and you will immediately find some staff that are unable or unwilling to speak English, and many who at least won't switch unless you ask. But it's also not surprising given how abrupt the number of tourists fall off...

testing22321 2mo ago

> Not in most of Western and Central Europe. Everyone speaks great English You are completely forgetting the people trying to move there who don’t speak English OR the native language

aveao 2mo ago
For my german work visa in 2022, I had to either give proof of sufficient german knowledge, or a letter from my employer confirming the job would be in english. "People who don't speak english or native language" does not represent the people moving for work to germany. Most family reunion routes at least require A1 german as well (which is super easy to pass, but is scary enough for some anyways).

eptcyka 2mo ago

Only if you live in metropolitan cities.

aveao 2mo ago

This isn't really true. I've lived in both Munich and Hamburg now, and you 100% need some amount of german to navigate life, many people do not in fact have conversational-level english. I often say that the common paths tend to be easy to navigate in english (e.g. booking a train ticket, getting a phone line), but the adjacent flows (e.g. filing a refund request for your unfulfilled seat reservation, cancelling your phone contract) often require talking to someone in german. A doctor may be marked as speaking english, but that doesn't mean that their reception speaks english. Berlin may be a different story within Germany, and then there's the entirety of e.g. Netherlands, but I know that the situation in France isn't better than here. --- That said, B1 is a difficult level within german. Being able to converse fluently enough in not-quite-correct german -which is enough for getting through day to day life- is not necessarily enough to pass the test, and you really need to crunch through memorizing the grammatical gender of thousands of words, alongside getting really good at applying them in various grammatical forms (e.g. declensions vary for the same word based on how it's used).

marcus_holmes 2mo ago

This was my experience. I lived for almost four years in Berlin, and was trying to learn German (I got to A2, which isn't much). But actually getting experience/immersion in German is difficult in Berlin - everyone under the age of 50 speaks good English and switched to that as soon as my first badly-conjugated sentence left my mouth. I worked for two German companies while I was there, and the entire tech team in both companies did everything in English. This is normal there. In one of them, the (German) CEO gave a townhall speech to the entire company (~1000 employees) in English. So yes, it's very understandable for the German government to say "you must be at least B1 to live here" but that doesn't recognise the fact that it is perfectly possible to actually live and work in Berlin with no German at all. It's different in other German cities, apparently. If we'd moved to Munich or Cologne I would have had more pressure to learn German, and also more exposure to it and more immersion which would have helped learn it.

throwaway2037 2mo ago
Did you ask if you can move to a different city and work remotely? Even if only 1-2 years, it might really help to boost your German. Moving to Dresden, Hanover, or Hamburg would help. (German HNers can probably recommend a bunch of small cities 1-2 hours away by train/car from Berlin that will use much more German language!) You could come to the office once a week. Another tip: Always start the conversation in German. If the person switches to English, ask them politely to speak German, and explain that you are studying German. My parents did similar when they moved to the Netherlands 50 years ago. The local shopkeepers were eager to practice English with my parents, but my parents were also eager to practice their Dutch.
- marcus_holmes 2mo ago
  That's really good advice, but I found it hard to put into practice because my German was so bad. And German isn't a language you can just hammer out a badly-formed sentence in; word position is less important than conjugation, so if you get the conjugation wrong it makes no sense at all to the listener. I did try this a few times, but everyone lost patience with the painful butchering of their language when they realised their English was a lot better than my German. I would have moved city, but a: COVID b: my wife also had a job there c: I really loved Berlin and really enjoyed living there

stnikolauswagne 2mo ago

There is some sort of weird phenomenon that I cant quite put to words, but the core is: While there is a big chunk of the native german population speaking great english there is a subset of (often) service workers who... dont. Had multiple furniture movers come through my house the last few weeks, the only way to communicate with them was broken german, since they had no english skills and my (croatian? serbian?) skills were zero. At one point I ended up in the weirdest situation of my live were i translated the german instructions from the phone rep into english to the shift lead of the moving company so he could then give them in the native language to the movers.

bulbar 2mo ago
That's basically why you should learn the language of the country you live in. Blaming people for not speaking English in Germany is pretty weird. How about learning German instead?
- fransje26 2mo ago
  > Blaming people for not speaking English in Germany is pretty weird. How about learning German instead? As the poster wrote: >> At one point I ended up in the weirdest situation of my live were i translated the german instructions from the phone rep into english [..] which implies that he does, in fact, speak German. The movers did not, though.
- stnikolauswagne 2mo ago
  I speak german as a mothertongue and fluent english, and I had massive troubles communicating in my own home.
  - bulbar 2mo ago
    I see, that wasn't clear to me from what you wrote.