It’s been 20 years since I was there, but people would see me, an obvious foreigner, and approach me to speak English. It happened pretty much everywhere I went. Before I even said a word, I’d be addressed in English. If I responded in German, they’d respond right back in English.
Not that I’m complaining. I only knew like 100 words in German. Just thought it was an interesting trend.
Anecdotally I went to Paris in the offseason and the locals were some of the nicest out of any country I visited on that trip. My French is shit but they tried so hard to work with me lol.
It’ll be useful. Unless you’re in maybe Oslo or Bergen, everything (signs, labels on all groceries, announcements, etc) is in Norsk and not everyone can/is willing to speak English, even Gen Y and younger.
I hope this is true. I’m going to Spain in a few months and my Spanish is ok, but it’s definitely Mexican Spanish and much slower than they speak in Spain. I’m gonna give it my best shot, so hopefully people are happy and not embarrassed for me and my mediocre grammar. I’ve been before but it’s been almost 25 years and I was a lot more fluent then.
You needn’t worry.The Spanish really appreciate attempts at Spanish in my experience, simply because you have so many people who don’t bother their arse and just assume they speak English, which invariably they do in the service sector.
You may want to check your display setting because the pink and the red are very visibly different. If your settings are correct you may want to take a colorblindness test.
Ive heard from a few different tourists who went to places like Italy and South and Centeral American countries, and aparently often times people there want to practice their english which can cause quite the funny scene where you’re both speaking each others language poorly at one another.
Someone’s never been to Germany. The only people I met who spoke English were a guy working in burger king who sounded like the terminator, and a baked teenager.
The 10 phrases I remembered from highschool did a lot of heavy lifting.
I was in Austria and had very little problem finding people who spoke English, except for the housekeeper for when I needed extra towels, she didn’t speak a word.
Huh. Literally everyone we interacted with in Germany spoke English. They’d start speaking it to us before even trying German - apparently the smiling is a dead giveaway that we were Americans and they all clocked us immediately.
One museum staffer looked at us when we came in and said, “American?” before we even spoke, so yeah, pretty much. She wasn’t rude about it, she could just tell.
I’m in the middle. I’ve been to Germany a couple of times, met plenty of English speakers, met plenty of people who had to endure my Dutch-infested attempt at German, and one lady who spoke no English but was born in France so had to endure my by then atrophied schoolboy French.
Yeah in my experience pretty much everyone under the age of around 40 in any major city speaks English there. Cities like Berlin sometimes it seems like half the people there don’t even speak German haha
Yeah that makes sense, that’s right about when they started teaching English in schools from grade school on. That’s why everyone under 40 tends to speak great English but over 40 and it’s hit or miss.
Zeuthen was technically in the DDR but it’s also a satellite city of Berlin, so I’d expect more English proficiency. Even if you go to the most provincial shit kicker town in Norway, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, Finland every homeless alcoholic or heroin addict is at least bilingual but my experience in Germany was that outside tourist traps you’d be lucky to get a couple of sentences out of anyone.
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