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Comment by whitepoplar | Hacker News Reader

I really enjoyed Vienna last time I visited. I got the impression that fluent German would be necessary in order to live there. I'm totally into learning new languages, but fear that I wouldn't be able to learn German quick enough to settle in. What's your take on this?

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It won’t be a problem if you don’t know German. Everybody is at least capable of basic English so you will almost never be able to not communicate with somebody. You can take your time with learning the German basics but you can also totally live there for 1-2 years without speaking German. Australian/Irish pubs are generally hosted by people with English as their mother tongue.

What does quick enough mean? How much of the language do you want to learn? As a native speaker I can’t comment on how hard it is to learn the language but working with people that are new to Germany here and there, some of them are amazingly fast at learning the language. Others don’t care too much so they need more time. From the outside it seems doable.

My thought is that if I only spend 1-2 years in a place, if it takes me a year or more to learn the language, I may be ready to leave by the time I've gotten a handle on it.

How fluent do you want to speak? I think you’ll manage to get by in German speaking places but learning the language isn’t easy. At least that’s what other people say, I grew up with it, for me things intuitively make sense somehow haha. As for me I’d go somewhere with better weather, a little closer to the equator I believe.

I think my bar for learning a language is being able to fit in socially without being "that guy who only speaks English/broken [insert language]". I'm sure I could learn barebones German in a short while, but feeling shut out of social activity because I don't speak with fluency doesn't sound like a fun.

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