I was talking to someone at work and she came back from Paris. Though she liked the trip she said her travel agent told her “Oh don’t worry everyone in Paris speaks English.” She said “No one spoke English. It was a nightmare, no one knew what the hell I was saying and I didn’t know what they were saying.”
I don’t know if this is so, but it’s her opinion anyway.
So if you were a tourist visiting a city, which in your opinion has been the least English friendly major city.
By major let’s say over a million people or the capital of a country. Obviously a little village in the Central African Republic isn’t going to have any English speakers
And I use the term “English friendly” as in ability to communitcate with the natives in English. Like the term a computer program is “user friendly”
I don’t mean “friendly” as in “the natives have to like you or your culture a lot.”
In the Western Hemisphere, the farthest south I’ve been is Nicaragua, but I’ve heard that English won’t get you far at all anywhere in South America. Word is you really need to know Spanish (or Portuguese for Brazil).
When I visited Seoul a few years ago, I didn’t have a problem with English at the hotel, in major department stores and in the tourist spots. But one day i decided to walk around and visit small neighborhood shops and do an “off the beaten tourist paths” thing. I encountered difficulty communicating with adults. They were all very nice and polite, though, so it was not a bad experience for me. In one shop, a nice old lady called her grandchild from the back of the store to translate for us.
I didn’t have communication problems when I visited Paris but I visited the usual tourist spots so maybe my experience in Paris is too limited to serve as a proper example in this thread.
Any place in inland China is going to be tough. While there are plenty of students and business people who speak English, most shop owners, restaurants, etc. are not going to know anything beyond maybe “hello.” And, you get double screwed because almost all the important signs, menus, etc. are in hanzi, so you can’t even try sounding stuff out.
I have been to Paris a couple of times during the last years and I never had any problems speaking English, but then I also speak some French and that’s the language I start with.
A couple of months ago I and some friends visited Duisburg in Germany and for various reasons we always seemed to come back to the same pub. The first time the waitress was very reluctant to speak English, but on the third occasion she chatted away like a native. Probably she was a bit insecure about her English but found out that there was nothing she had to be ashamed of.
“Everybody speaks English”… why do travel agents claim that even when speaking about 15-people villages in Uzbekhistan? Well, in Costa Rica to name one, most people do speak English. Some English. Often, “English for people in the tourist trades”. So, they know how to give you a price, how to make change, how to explain which species the framed painted feathers are from, but will not be able to tell you whether the banana shake is made with milk or not or talk about the weather. In Spain, less than that; educated people over age 50 are likely to have studied French as their foreign language, and most people have never used English except in English class, for trips abroad or to give directions to a tourist (a situation where posession of a map or of pen and paper to draw one is 2/3 of the language skills you need).
I didn’t have that much problem in Paris. But I went prepared. I wrote down the name of my hotel and its address on study cardboard and kept it handy for taxi drivers. I learned to say “I’m sory” and “I don’t understand French.” I would try to order some basic items from French menus, but the waiters usually spoke beautiful English.
If I let them know how much I liked their city and their country and the Parisians, that was a language easily understood without having to know a lot of words.
I’m not super well-traveled within South America, but in my limited experience, I agree with Siam Sam that without at least a little bit of Spanish, it could be problematic. I met one person in Colombia that spoke English. And I was in Bogota, Medellin, and Cartagena, all of which have over a million people. (I still can’t figure out how to make accented characters on my keyboard without copy and paste.) My Spanish isn’t fantastic, but I can get around okay, and one of my traveling companions minored in Spanish in college, so we didn’t have too many problems; I’m not sure how well things would have gone if this hadn’t been the case. Maybe we would have discovered Colombians’ hidden talent for English? I don’t know.
Eastern Europeans tend not to speak English very well. Well, there’s an age division among people who’ve studied it and people who haven’t, and something of a class division as well. I think it would be normal to find someone who spoke English in an upscale bar or restaurant, or a hostel with lots of backpackers, but you’re unlikely to find an English-speaking cab driver, or an English speaker in a small, non-touristy store or restaurant. I could definitely see it being a problem if you want to do anything off the beaten path, even within a big city.
Speaking of speaking English, here’s a question I’ve been wanting to ask for a while: Given that English is probably your best bet for traveling through Europe as far as a language that some people might speak, is there any equivalent for Asian languages in Asia? Like… if you wanted to go to Asia, and were up for studying one Asian language, is there one that is semi-universally understood, much like English is in some parts of Europe?
Disclaimer: I realize English isn’t spoken everywhere. I don’t expect to hear that there is one Asian language that’s spoken everywhere. But given that there’s probably a better chance that someone in, say, Paris will speak English over Greek or another European language, I’m thinking if someone was going to learn one language before going to Europe, English would be a good bet.
My vote has got to go with the big cities of China. Not a lot of English spoken, when it is it is more often very poor, and it is really, really hard for a non-Chinese speaker to match up the characters on street signs, buses, trains, etc. because the Roman alphabet was very much an afterthought when I was there.
Things could have changed in the last 10 years though.
As far as general applicability of languages throughout Asia, English is your best bet.
Paris was not a big problem. I had far more trouble in Budapest.
Tokyo is hard to classify. The vast majority of people don’t speak English well (although it is supposedly taught in all schools), but the city is so huge that in any crowd there is always someone around who does speak it.
Paris and most other major world cities are not a problem. When needing translations, look for younger people (ages 16-25). Most of them love to talk to Americans so they can practice their English. If you are expecting the 50-60 year old to know English, you’re just not thinking practically.
I found that traveling through rural Honduras and Guatemala would be difficult without some knowledge of Spanish. Even in the major cities its tough to find english speakers though I did meet a couple.
No one in Japan speaks English. But, they’ll spend 20 minutes working with an English dictionary or call up the one person they know who kinda-sorta speaks English on their cellphone and hand it to you, or whatever else it takes to get the job done.
I’m not sure whether that counts as English friendly or English unfriendly.
At one time, I was considering a trip to Moscow - airfare is remarkably cheap compared even to less distant European destinations, and it’s supposed to be a very neat place. A Russian-fluent friend disabused me of the notion - I don’t speak Russian at all, and was told I’d have a very hard time getting by in Moscow. English speakers are there, but not common enough to rely upon, and none of the metro signage is in English.
Damn shame. I’d like to go some day, but I’ll need a Russian-speaking friend.
The Asian equivalent of English is English. That is, there are people who speak it everywhere. If you’re talking about Southeast Asia, you’d probably be better off with Mandarin, but that’s akin to learning Spanish in order to visit western Europe. I mean, there are no Mandarin speakers in India, Bangladesh, Nepal*, Pakistan, Russia, and so on, and hardly any in the majority of southeast Asian countries.
In Central Asia it can be very difficult to find an English speaking local when you need one. Basically anywhere where Russian is lingua franca, I suppose.
English is the universal language of business. Almost all business contracts between two different companies that don’t have the same native language will be done in English as it is normally the common second language of both companies.
English is also the most favored second language taught in schools in non-english speaking countries.
Here’s a language joke for you:
What do you call someone that speaks more than two languages?
Multi-lingual
What do you call someone that speaks only two languages?
bi-lingual
What do you call someone that speaks only one language?
That’s an old joke and I’ve always thought it was stupid and nonsensical. If English is the most universal of languages, then what would be the need for a native speaker of it to learn several other languages? (Beyond for their own enjoyment, or enough simple phrases to get by when traveling. Obviously if you will be living long term in another country then you should learn the language.) Not to mention that I can travel for 3000 miles and still be in the same country with the same language.
And I can drive a little over 700 miles, and be in a different country with people speaking a different language all around me – with some of them speaking little or no English. (I’m talking about Montreal, the closest large non-English-speaking city to where I live in the U.S.)
