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.
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.
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.
Although, there were also people who only spoke German.
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.
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.
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
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.
What we in the Anglosphere would consider rude, they consider efficient. It can be very off-putting at first, but you do get used to it.
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.
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).
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.
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.
For sure not in France and Spain (outside of tourist areas).
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 are completely forgetting the people trying to move there who don’t speak English OR the native language
"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).