[stnikolauswagne]

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]

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]

> 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]

I speak german as a mothertongue and fluent english, and I had massive troubles communicating in my own home.

[bulbar]

I see, that wasn't clear to me from what you wrote.