How’s watching John Wayne dubbed into German going to help your English? I think that in spite of your experience, you are highly overestimating the level of English understood and spoken. But what really bugs me about your strategy of sort of politely coaxing non-English people into speaking your language in their own country is that you basically seem to be fine with putting them in an awkward spot just to serve your purpose. It seems to me that the visitor - the OP - is the one who should be making the effort. What you’re suggesting is the other way around and seems a bit rude and arrogant, to be frank.
One more reason the OP should do this is this is an opportunity to actually learn a language other than English really well, which is something you do best surrounded by speakers of that language, and which IMHO is a very valuable asset in many ways. So even apart from practical issues here, I think that rather than using a few polite phrases waiting for the other party to switch to English, I think the OP should put in a real effort to learn some German and get the most out of his/her year there.
Thank you all very much for your replies! And thanks to whatever mod moved this to IMHO, replies have blossomed since it moved.
For the lovely folks who asked, I will be living in a smallish-city/large-ish town in southern Germany, on the shores of Lake Constance (aka the Bodensee), which separates Germany from Switzerland.
Zoe: A homestay program is one in which instead of being set loose in Germany on my own, I stay with a German family. I have spoken with my family on the phone, and they seem like quite reasonable people. Fortunately, the program I am going with does not require me to personally host a German, as I don’t foresee myself having the space and time, but it’d be cool in the future.
I do speak some German, but I consider it mostly ‘survival-level.’ Fortunately, I’m decent with foreign languages (good for me, as I’m quite bad at math, so it makes up) and I don’t think I should have any more trouble than is ordinary. I will be taking a ‘German for foreigners’ class.
I’m quite nervous about living in a cold climate. The Lake Constance area isn’t that cold compared to some parts of Europe, but it sure is cold to a Vegas/Texas person like me. I was talking to my host family and they mentioned that “Sometimes it gets very cold here, even over 80 degrees Fahrenheit.” It was over a hundred that day here. I’ve never so much as shoveled snow. This should be an education…
You’ll be fine. It won’t get really cold for another couple of months so you’ll be able to acclimatize. Someone I know lived in TX and then went to Germany for an exchange year and couldn’t stand the heat when she got back. And the Bodensee area is awesome, I hear. Is it Konstanz you’ll be in?
I have nothing much to say to this. Provide me a cite proving Germans are largely English deprived. Until then, I’m going with my real life experience and I’ve never had a problem anywhere in Germany. If there are Dopers here who feel most Germans don’t know any English I have to seriously question their interpersonal skills and what you were doing to piss off the Germans.
Germans apparently like me, and spontaneously sprout English skills commensurate with my German skills.
Seriously, what are you doing to make them not like you and withhold their communication skills?
and then when people question that you want them to provide cites? That strikes me as odd. All you cite is your own personal experience, which, even when it is probably extensive, is inherently limited because you are only one person and there’s, what, 80 million Germans?
I’m glad you strike the Germans as a likable chap, though, good for you. Me, I don’t know if I piss off Germans by speaking English to them because I never do - I’ll speak German. For the record, though, I hardly think people skills are the issue here.
Well, Germans do understand enough English. I guess we could quibble over what “enough” means but for himmel’s sake, I’m not saying “don’t learn German; you don’t need it.” Re-read my posts. I encourage people to learn as much German as they can, and be as polite about not knowing German as they can.
It’s good that you endorse German learning. However, as someone who’s on the receiving end of English speakers (and others) not knowing or bothering to learn his language (Dutch), your approach to this issue hardly comes across as polite.
This is not to say, of course, that everyone coming to the Netherlands should learn Dutch, or that it’s easy (the Dutch are actually known for thwarting attempts to learn Dutch by flaunting their English skills at the aspiring Dutch speaker - which is something you probably won’t have to deal with so much in Germany) but if you’re actually staying someplace for a year, than it’s up to you to make the effort and to do the sometimes embarrassing and awkward work of stumbling around in another language.
If someone hasn’t studied a language before, what would you suggest they do other than get a phrase book and be polite?
You don’t appear to be a native English speaker so let me explain, “butcher the language” means “politely try your best with what limited language you have, because it’s better than nothing.”
I had been under the impression that nearly everyone in Germany speaks really good English but it definitely seems to vary by locale. I also realised the last time I was over that even though they may have done English in school (like I did German, French and Irish) they may not be comfortable speaking it.
Good luck in Germany. I have had various pleasant stays.
Just remember: Germans don’t do comedy…Germans do bier.
An aside: are bottled german beers still sold in racks of 20? I used to love hauling that plastic crate back to my barracks, drinking up and then getting a deposit on my next rack by returning the empties. Recycling at it’s finest, and this was in 1990.
I loved export-style beers, but there are so many good ones. Every town seemed to have it’s own brewery.
If you mean people know the basics, the way lots of non-Latino people in the U.S. know some bits of Spanish, then I would agree with you. But I insist that most people doing mundane lower-level jobs–unless those jobs are somehow connected with international travel–do not speak or understand English well. At least, that was my observation in Goettingen, where I lived for a year as a student. Admittedly, it was a long time ago, and things may have changed. Goettingen is not a big city by American standards, and maybe in the “Millionenstaedten”, things are different. But such was my observation in Goettingen.
Since I speak German, I used that language in everyday life. Once, however, I decided to see how I would do using only English, and believe me most people I needed to talk to, such as cashiers and others who deal directly with the public, did not know English well. They probably had studied it in secondary school a decade or two previously, but that is not the same thing as knowing the language well.
Horseshit. I speak English just fine, thank you, and there’s nothing here that my inferior grasp of the language prevented me from understanding. It’s not the ‘butchering’ that I take issue with - butchering, BTW, doesn’t mean ‘politely trying’ in my book or in anyone else’s. You wanna know what I do take issue with? Reread my posts, I’m not explaining it again, lest I have to resort to less-than-diplomatic language. For the record, I really resent the fact that you’re trying to win this argument by pointing to my apparent lack of understanding of your language, something which does not actually appear from anything I post on this board and of which you can have no personal knowledge whatsoever.
Well, actually, ‘butchering’ does means exactly that, in this context: ‘politely trying’ to do one’s best in a foreign language s/he doesn’t speak very well’, and I doubt if it’s ever intended in a mean or nasty way. It’s humor by exaggeration. levdrakon wasn’t trying to insult anyone; he was just saying that in the end, if a German and an American meet, on German soil, and the German knows English better than the American knows German, they’re going to end up using English. I agree with you that the OP should try to learn the language before going over there, and should get himself a Rosetta Stone course if at all possible. I also stand by my earlier statement that many if not most Germans don’t know English terribly well, but they do know it better than most Americans know German.
That some Americans expect Europeans to speak English? I can’t totally justify that either, but you have to admit we VERY rarely have any chance here to use any Continental language, other than Spanish, and I can tell you that without regular use one’s knowledge of a foreign language quickly fades. That’s less of a problem now what with webcasts of news and entertainment that now make European languages accessible to everyone, but these things take a long time to change. Before the advent of netcasts, one’s only recourse to practice a European language (except Spanish) was to read. German-American cultural presence is rapidly fading as our immigrants now mostly come from Latin America and Asia, and German immigration has been negligible for years. I joke that when my stepdaughter, now living in Berlin as a teacher, comes to visit, the number of German speakers in Los Angeles doubles to two–she and I.
You, on the other hand, have English speakers from the UK all the time, or you can go there easily enough. It’s a short easy trip either way. You do have far more opportunity to use English than Americans have to use Dutch or German. Most of us can’t afford to travel across the ocean, and then manage to stay a week or two the way our currency is right now.
We usually don’t say ‘horseshit’ either, in the figurative sense. It’s ‘bullshit’. I’m not picking on you, but pointing out that little things like that are the things that suggest the possibility of some language misunderstanding. I think levdrakon might have had a good reason for thinking you misunderstood his point–even if that assessment was incorrect–and was genuinely trying to help.
I apologize. I really wasn’t trying to win an argument using any particular sneaky technique. I don’t really consider this an argument as much as an exchange of experiences.
I don’t mean to beat this dead horseshit into the ground, but perhaps one of the reasons I found few Germans spoke English is because I learned German fairly quickly while living there (over 14 years) - and thus very few found the need to converse with me in English.
That said, I just took a mental tally.
Of about 25 Germans who contact me, or visit me here in the US, on a regular basis:
3 speak English fluently (one lived here for 8 years, the other two travel a lot).
3 speak well enough to travel through the US on their own, but not chat much.
19 speak no English whatsoever and could not order dinner without help.
I suppose if I traveled through Germany and didn’t speak any German whatsoever, I might have met a lot more who spoke English, but that wasn’t the case for me.
I guess what I am trying to say is that you find what you are looking for - if you need to find Germans who speak English, most Germans you meet will therefore speak English. If you don’t need to find Germans who speak English, chances are good those you meet won’t speak English.
I have also found that not only in Germany, but everywhere in the world - when there are two people who have two different native languages, whoever speaks the other’s language best wins - and that is the language you use to converse.
Look at any bilingual live-in relationship you know, and I bet the language they speak at home is the language spoken best by both of them, regardless of the language spoken outside of the home.