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.
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.
Even when I vacationed in Bayern (Bavaria), a lot of people switched to English when they realized that my German wasn't that good. Which was frustrating, because I wanted to practice speaking with native speakers.
Although, there were also people who only spoke German.
This is the right way. Speak the language you want. Even if they reply to you in English, and they know you can speak English, continue in German. They will understand. They switch to English because they want to be helpful. If you continue in German they understand you prefer it that way.
Another thing is that once you start talking with a person (who you meet on a regular basis) in one language, it is hard to switch to another language at a later date. So if you start with English, it is hard to go back to German. But if you start with German, even if it is less fluent for you, it will come natural that with that person you speak in German.
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.
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
I like the effort! It is more that half of the battle when learning a new language as an adult. What really helped me: Create your own custom Anki deck. Literally, start from zero. Each time you try-and-fail (or think of something that you don't know how to say), write a note to yourself in English/broken German with the sentence/idea that failed. At home, use a translate tool (LLM/Google/whatever) to build the correct German sentence. Next, add it to your Anki deck. Personally, I only add full sentences, never just vocab, because it adds more natural context. Only add real stuff that you will use. On the first day, you have an Anki deck with one card. If you are really motivated, try to add one card per day, but just 1-2 cards per week will quickly improve the deck. Since the deck is so damn small, you can blow through it in five minutes while riding the S-Bahn/U-Bahn trains. And, every single sentence is useful to you. Bonus: Ask a native German speaker about some of your Anki deck sentences. They will probably love to talk to you about the German language because you will be showing your commitment.
>everyone under the age of 50 speaks good English and switched to that as soon as my first badly-conjugated sentence left my mouth.
OK maybe things have changed in recent years. I was always annoyed when coming to visit family living in Berlin for a couple days or driving in to a conference, and inevitably there would come a time when I would have to ask someone for help and I would have to ask in English because I do not speak German (although due to youthful immersion I start to remember it again after a couple of weeks) and they would inevitably answer in German.
I could somewhat understand when we stopped in a park asking where the convention center was of just a couple people by the side of the road, but asking a ticket agent at a train station what route I should take to get to a particular station and getting replies in German seemed especially rude.
At any rate despite some good experiences with Germans regarding helpfulness I have had a few too many negative experiences.
in most other countries renowned for being efficient it would not be considered efficient to answer in a language the questioner evidently does not speak.
To play the devils advocate: It is efficient — for them.
It is a bit of a myth that everybody in Germany talks English. Sure in an academic or business environment, or in certain social circles that can be taken for granted, but there are people who can only talk German or whose English is so bad they will avoid talking it.
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.
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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).
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.
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...
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!
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.
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!
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!
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).
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.