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Comment by rexgallorum2 | Hacker News Reader

I will second this. I've lived and taught (and tested) English in continental Europe for a decade. The idea that most people in continental Europe speak English is a misconception, and one should take population-level statistics on language proficiency with a grain of salt.

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You can't sum up such a diverse place into "continental Europe" and do an average. There are huge cities where everyone speaks English and then a huge bunch of small villages where no one does. Obviously business happens mainly in the cities. It's very probable that the target groups of a B2B startup speak English flawlessly.

>>> There are huge cities where everyone speaks English

Point being, no, there are not! Have a look at wikipedia for the biggest cities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_cities_by_pop...

You can go to any of these cities (excluding the UK) and ask your way around to locals. You will be hard pressed to find someone who can understand well and reply you.

People will manage to do a check in or take a restaurant order but don't expect to hold a conversation.

From my personal experience, you're wrong at least about Berlin, Prague, Rome, Vienna, Hamburg, Warsaw, Munich, Milan, Brussels, Cologne (man, 100+ thousands of people in the Rhine-Ruhr area don't speak German at conversation level at all) and so on. I don't know about the really eastern ones, but we're talking about the EU, so non-EU Balkan states, Belarus, Russia and Ukraine is excluded. You're probably right about the eastern and eastern-southern border of the EU; it's also true in Poland outside of Poznan, Krakow, Warsaw and several more bigger cities.

Luckily, there is an index we can look at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EF_English_Proficiency_Index , of course this one received a lot of criticism, so we can look at this one instead: http://www.surveylang.org/media/ExecutivesummaryoftheESLC_21...

Coincidentally, these cities I listed are the cities that really matter from the business perspective.

Well, I've been in some of them last year and I had a different experience.

Sure, the 5 star hotels and the people I do business with speak English well. Anyone else, not so much.

@TomMarius et al.: True. 'Continental Europe' is just meant to exclude the UK and Ireland for obvious reasons.

But what constitutes 'speaking English'? https://www.coe.int/t/dg4/linguistic/Source/Framework_EN.pdf

Human fallacy? When 1/2 don't speak English, this could be misrepresented in certain countries.

Eg. no education in English in certain countries or rural areas.

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