[ManuelKiessling]

It’s the one thing where I’m That Old White Man by now. My favorite is user groups meetups in Germany where there are one or two people who don’t speak German, and then request the talk to be held in English.

Imagine me attending a meetup in London as the only German and requesting to have the talk held in German. It would be ridiculous.

[petodo]

German is not lingua franca spoken by people all around world, so yes, this comparison is ridiculous comparing lanugage taught everywhere in world with niche language, which is less popular than Chinese as foreign language.

[ManuelKiessling]

English is spoken by people all around the world, but not all people around the world speak English.

Also, those expats living an English life in Berlin etc. are doing themselves a huge disservice — you learn a language if and only if you are forced to hear and speak it. By attending meetups and softly forcing your language onto the group, you are never going to break out of your bubble.

It’s a lose-lose situation for everyone involved, really. The German speaker is limited in what she or he can express, the German audience is limited in what they can understand, the English audience doesn’t progress in learning the language of their new home country.

[epups]

> It’s a lose-lose situation for everyone involved, really. The German speaker is limited in what she or he can express, the German audience is limited in what they can understand, the English audience doesn’t progress in learning the language of their new home country.

Maybe, but by not learning German they expats miss out on access to about 40 million Germans/Austrians/Swiss who don't also speak English (and they are likely not the smartest ones either). By not learning English, the locals block themselves out of a vast amount of knowledge and resources contributed by over 1 billion people.

[bigpeopleareold]

Expats miss out on local job opportunities that need German speakers.

I am not in Germany, but the point applies to other countries. I missed out on extremely good opportunities a few years ago because I didn't speak the local language well (like opps that would have gotten me an easy 20-30% raises. I was constantly having to say no to recruiters because of that one detail, that I was not good enough at the time. I did get good and I did get a good opportunity and I hope in the future that I don't see it any other way that the investment of putting my head into something like that will have a great return in the future.

[modo_mario]

So I take it you took it upon yourself to learn Mandarin and perhaps also Spanish?

[anthk]

With Spanish and English you can communicate from Canada to Patagonia except for Brazil (and the Brazilians will understand an 80% of spoken Spanish and a 90% of written one because of Romance similarities), among UK, Spain and Scandinavia. Also a good part of France, Portugal and lots of Southern Italians will understand you in Spanish too.

[ManuelKiessling]

No, but I don’t engage in Mandarin or Spanish communities.

I do engage in English-speaking communities, and I do so using English.

[petodo]

You are working with assumption people don't live in their bubbles even when living in home country speaking mother tongue and that not breaking bubble is something bad. Many people voluntarily choose to live in bubbles which overlap with other bubbles.

For instance I live in bubble where in general I avoid having conversation with obese people, since these people have complete lack of self control. It would be also quite odd to me to have (deep) conversation with person not speaking English (even if we both talk to each other in different language), since that shows ignorance to learn basic necessity to exist in present world and lack of education and world views (I mean how the heck can you learn anything about the world not speaking English just from limited local sources). I'd probably for various reasons avoid talking to people with dreadlocks and/or large amount of tattoos. You may think I am doing disservice to myself by living in bubble without talking to all these people, but I am fine with that and have my reasons for that.

How do you know it's disservice, if they are happy with their choice, you know better than them what's good for them?

Only thing I agree with you it's forcing 90% of local language speaking group to speak English because of just few people who don't wanna learn language, this will get tiresome pretty quickly, so they better find group with larger percentage of local language non-speakers or just make smaller groups or talk one on one (personally I prefer this option than some big group conversations even in my mother tongue, because there you end up fighting for word).

[Tainnor]

> since that shows ignorance to learn basic necessity to exist in present world and lack of education and world views (I mean how the heck can you learn anything about the world not speaking English just from limited local sources).

My parents' generation learned Latin and French instead of English, and there's an argument to be made that you also can't really understand a lot of the world without at least some passing familiarity with both of these languages. In the GDR, people used to learn Russian, for obvious reasons, and that's not so long ago - many of these people are still in the workforce.

[petodo]

That's not really an excuse, my retired father learned Latin, German (to the level he was translator) and Russian and he still late in his age learned also at least basic English.

Meanwhile my ignorant low educated mother learned just very basic German needed in shop to be able to communicate with German speaking customers.

I can cut you some slack if you are above 50 and know at least some other languages, but honestly you should still know at least very basic English even without formal education. I also learned at least very basic Spanish without any formal education. There is no excuse for anyone below 50 to not speak English even if they speak Latin or German.

[Tainnor]

I bet I could find 10 things that "a reasonable person" should know / be able to do, which you would utterly fail at.

The scope of human knowledge and abilities is so vast, it's really strange that you'd fault anybody for not having the exact same interests as you.

Also, knowing "some basic English" is not nearly enough to enjoy series, movies etc. or to read news in English.

Also, the way you speak about your own mother... man, you seem to have some anger issues.

[lmm]

There was a time when German was the language of science and widely studied in many countries. (Japanese has disproportionately many loanwords from German, for example).

[Tainnor]

Tragically, it was in no small part the fault of the Nazis that led to the decline of German for science. A huge number of German scientists emigrated to the US in the 1930s.

[Lio]

I'd give it a go if you want to speak German for a bit. However, the conversation is very likely to be skewed towards talking about Kraftwerk, Nue! and careers of Eric Zabel, Jens Voigt and Andre Greipel.

(To be perfectly frank, even if you're speaking in English the conversation is going to be skewed towards Kraftwerk, Nue! and careers of Eric Zabel, Jens Voigt and Andre Greipel. Sorry about that.)

Joking aside, I don't think I've ever met a local that didn't appreciate my attempts to start a conversation in their language even if we eventually switch to English.

[bigpeopleareold]

I upvoted you because I appreciate the sentiment a lot.

As a non-native speaker in my country, if I seek to participate in meetups, etc. with the expectation that the language used will be the local one, I would prefer not to switch to English. I deliberately go to tech meetups partly for that purpose. It's fine to switch to English if the presentation is specifically in English, but I do not want the audience to accommodate to my lacking; I'd rather be clueless than be accommodated.