It's still an expectation I have, even as a native German speaker. I work for a well-known German company (our storefronts are sometimes called "the German embassy"), and our day-to-day business language at work is ... English. We hire from all over and want people to be able to get around effectively. This is infrastructure. Make it work.
Шановні пасажири, цей потяг який слідує від станції Івано-Франківськ Головний через Житомир до станції Київ-Дарниця буде розділено дві частини, вагони з першого по п'ятнадцятий прослідують до станції Київ-Головний, а вагони з шістнадцятого по двадцять перший поїдуть у пекло, муахаха. Дякую за вашу увагу.
Honestly, it should be an obligation. DB should make it one for themselves. DB carries millions of people a year that do not speak the language. Important information like route changes should be available to them. English just happens to be the most likely language to be understood at least enough to ask staff/other passengers as to what is going on.
Not being under any obligation doesn't mean it is not a sensible a courteous way to do. You like it or not, english has become a defacto common international language.
While I speak 5 languages and try to learn some basic words of the local languages of any country I visit out of courtesy (how to say hello, bye, thank you, ask where are the toilets, etc), I wouldn't expect any traveller to know enough to understand this kind of specificities in any country they visit.
Of course they’re under no obligation to do so. In fact, they’re under no obligation to let in foreign tourists at all, or to not make their lives arbitrarily hard in various ways. But not being obligated to not be a dick doesn’t mean you should in fact be one.
This is the sort of immature "well, actually" response that you can't afford anymore once you actually take responsibility for things. I wish more people trained themselves to have a "what if I had to do it" habit before having an opinion.
Imagine you're in charge of the train network. You have to pay for the announcements on trains. You can't reasonanbly pay 10 announcements because that's silly and expensive. If you add any language other than German, which are you going to add?
Look, as an EU country citizen, English is more or less the defacto language of the EU, regardless of what politicians declare. Everyone in the EU speaks english in some form as even traveling to a next door country like you state requires communication.
There are cases where in Belgium you will see signs in 4 languages (Dutch, French, Flemish and English)
Also if you ever travel in Japan, they have signs, especially on trains, all in, Japanese, Chinese, Korean and English all in one. (usually rotating signage). So the precedent is there to do it on mass transit but :shrug:.
Point is, when your customer base is logically needing more language options, it should be considered.
Because even in countries less developed(by western standards), there are more English announcements, so visiting tourists can also use the public transport. This isn't lack of speaking the language as well, it is more about not wanting to speak another language because "In Deutschland muss man Deutsch sprechen." It is reaching French level of racism at this point. Funny for a country that wants to attract so many international expats.
This assume that a country should please english-speaking tourists but not everyone speaks that language. Here our perception is biased because we're in a english-speaking-forum. Tourism isn't a central concern for many people/countries and not supporting it is a valid choice.
> French level of racism
Racism really ??? As a Parisian I'll struggle to make tourists feel unpleasant but I assure you there's absolutely nothing to do with race. French from outside the capital get the same treatment, they just happen to understand our insults.
English is the international language. It is mandatory to learn it as the second language in most parts of the world, even places you never heard of. It is especially a no-brainer for a person who grew up in Germany(which is one of the most developed countries in the world, and definitely has the means to educate its own people). Again, this is a problem of choice. And since Germany is a country that relies on importing educated people to keep its economy afloat, choices like these are self-sabotaging.
This isn't an english-speaking-forum, its an international one. That is the reason English is being spoken.
I get why the French is still angry about this issue and refuses to speak English, since it isn't French that is considered the international language, but English.
I wouldn't expect a French to understand this though.
France can be afforded such idiosyncrasies because the French are generally rational thinking people, not clockwork slaves to a bureaucratic machine like Germans are made to be by their culture.
Lingua Franca predates colonialism. Latin predates Lingua Franca, although one can argue Latin was forced down due to the Roman Empire's extensive reach and size. Ancient Greek also served a similar role. One doesn't need to learn each others language as long as they all know one common language. One could argue for Esperanto, or a purely symbolic language like traffic icons, but you need to learn that one too. So it makes more sense to use a fit for purpose language for travel that has no ambiguities. You can even create a graph that can be queried. There's all sorts of ways to solve this with as little pain as possible as long as you care to. And wanting people to just learn the local language to traverse a transport network is chauvinism.
If you visited Japan as a tourist, I believe you learned enough to say hello, ask someone where your hotel is, and so on. I don’t for a second believe you learned enough to understand arbitrary train network change announcements. Unless you spend years studying the language before visiting any country as a tourist, which would be absurd.
Personally I worry about the Maltese/Irish supremacy that will arise as a result.
More seriously, I suspect that
> Since the exit of the United Kingdom from the EU in 2020, the government of France has encouraged greater use of French as a working language
will hasten the move to English in official proceedings. Almost 44% of the population understand it already, and it’s unclear why the teens of the EU who already speak near-perfect English would want to learn French other than for recreation.
Sure, but it never caught on. Not sure the point of your “/s” sign, since what you’re claiming is in fact true, and if it’s a joke it’s not a particularly funny one.
To be fair, it’s announced in the platform screens in a language abstract way, by indicating the destination and the platform segments (A,B vs C,D) to take to reach the destination.
The key is that on hundred of trains around the world this is done to indicate the convenience - these doors will be closer, etc.
Trains splitting in half are rare enough that THAT is what needs to be described.
The US equivalent is the empire builder which splits in Spokane (I believe) but it’s much more old fashioned and you have a tag above your seat showing your destination- if you somehow end up on the wrong car the conductor will wake you up and move you to the right one.
A similar one that can catch you (and has caught me) are express elevators or the two-story ones which mean you only can stop at even or odd floors depending on where you got on.
Not only unpopular, but pretty daft too. If you think the basics of a language should include "this train will separate into two at station X, please sit in the front Y carriages to get to Z" then enjoy doing a cross-Europe trip.
Basics for a casual traveller are 'hello, 'please', 'thank you', 'two beers', 'can I have the bill', and 'I'll take the schnitzel please'.
Perfectly understanding rapidly-spoken German explaining something esoteric about the splitting of a train is magnitudes, years of study beyond casual traveller level.
Going from the Netherlands to Budapest I started my journey with Deutsche Bahn. My train also did the split in half and go different directions trick. Was I supposed to learn Dutch, German, and Hungarian in order to buy my train tickets?
I took French for 5 years and I don't think I learned enough to understand a tannoy announcement that the train was being split into two parts. Tannoy announcements aren't the easiest to understand even for native speakers.
Knowing the basics is knowing how to salute, thanks, ask basic directions. You can't ask everyone to know every single language they visit and be able to understand stuff mentionned in a foreign language in a possibly noisy environment and from an only half decent speaker system.
> Unpopular opinion: you should learn the absolute basics of the language used in the country you are travelling to.
As a German I disagree with this. Europe is a single market, we want to have people getting around crossing borders at all times to get stuff done. It pays to make things easier.
If you're going for a three-weeks leisure trip, sure, learn how to say hi and thank-you.
Belgium gave me one of the more annoying train experiences when I was a younger man. I was in Leuven for a conference, and had decided to bring my then girlfriend (now wife) for a trip, after which we would take the Eurostar to London. On the ticket, it said Brussels-Midi, but after happily boarding the train, we only saw the following related options on the train map for stops:
1. Brussel-Noord
2. Brussel-Centraal
3. Brussel-Zuid
So here we were, not speaking the language, rushing for a train that we were at risk of being late for, and not having a clear idea of the actual stop to get off of.
And the people on the train? Totally unhelpful. "Eurostar"? Shrug. "Train to London?" Blank looks.
Anyway we winged it and made it, but still a damn stupid set up if you want to be welcoming to tourists (and their money).
Hah nope! Even as a Belgian I find the naming of the Brussels train stations maddening. Brussels-Midi is the south station, so Brussel-Zuid. Midi allegedly means south in French, but I've never actually heard it being used over "sud", also south.
In conversation, midi also means noon (e.g. used as "meet me at noon"), which for my brain correlates more with central than south, given the context of a day.
Not a linguist, so what do I know, maybe someone else can chime in.
Brussels in particular perhaps is sort of non-intuitive because, even (or perhaps especially) if you know a little bit of French, the station names don't obviously correlate to their relative locations. There is a logic but it's not obvious to someone not used to it--and, honestly, I'd have to go online to figure it out again.
I was in Belgium going to Antwerp and sometimes the French name -- Anvers -- was used. At least in e.g. Valais in CH cities that have dual names are shown with both, e.g. Sierre/Siders.
It's really not too much to expect a train going to the airport to make important announcements in English.
Where I live the bus drivers that drive the bus from the capital to the airport barely speak the local language, let alone English.
Where I live the airport bus plays a prerecorded message. It's pretty obnoxious.
[flagged]
It's still an expectation I have, even as a native German speaker. I work for a well-known German company (our storefronts are sometimes called "the German embassy"), and our day-to-day business language at work is ... English. We hire from all over and want people to be able to get around effectively. This is infrastructure. Make it work.
Шановні пасажири, цей потяг який слідує від станції Івано-Франківськ Головний через Житомир до станції Київ-Дарниця буде розділено дві частини, вагони з першого по п'ятнадцятий прослідують до станції Київ-Головний, а вагони з шістнадцятого по двадцять перший поїдуть у пекло, муахаха. Дякую за вашу увагу.
2 replies →
Nu sunt englez, așa cã n-o sã-ți rãspund în englezã.
1 reply →
Honestly, it should be an obligation. DB should make it one for themselves. DB carries millions of people a year that do not speak the language. Important information like route changes should be available to them. English just happens to be the most likely language to be understood at least enough to ask staff/other passengers as to what is going on.
2 replies →
Not being under any obligation doesn't mean it is not a sensible a courteous way to do. You like it or not, english has become a defacto common international language.
While I speak 5 languages and try to learn some basic words of the local languages of any country I visit out of courtesy (how to say hello, bye, thank you, ask where are the toilets, etc), I wouldn't expect any traveller to know enough to understand this kind of specificities in any country they visit.
3 replies →
Of course they’re under no obligation to do so. In fact, they’re under no obligation to let in foreign tourists at all, or to not make their lives arbitrarily hard in various ways. But not being obligated to not be a dick doesn’t mean you should in fact be one.
1 reply →
And French, as Germany is adjacent to France.
There are train connections to Scandinavia, so let's add Swedish, Danish and Finnish.
Also Dutch and Polish to accommodate the other adjacent countries.
This is the sort of immature "well, actually" response that you can't afford anymore once you actually take responsibility for things. I wish more people trained themselves to have a "what if I had to do it" habit before having an opinion.
Imagine you're in charge of the train network. You have to pay for the announcements on trains. You can't reasonanbly pay 10 announcements because that's silly and expensive. If you add any language other than German, which are you going to add?
It's not hard to be pragmatic.
3 replies →
Cheap strawman. Travelling Swedes, Danes, Finns and Poles will be fine with English, Dutch with either/both English or German.
6 replies →
Look, as an EU country citizen, English is more or less the defacto language of the EU, regardless of what politicians declare. Everyone in the EU speaks english in some form as even traveling to a next door country like you state requires communication.
There are cases where in Belgium you will see signs in 4 languages (Dutch, French, Flemish and English)
Also if you ever travel in Japan, they have signs, especially on trains, all in, Japanese, Chinese, Korean and English all in one. (usually rotating signage). So the precedent is there to do it on mass transit but :shrug:.
Point is, when your customer base is logically needing more language options, it should be considered.
3 replies →
Because even in countries less developed(by western standards), there are more English announcements, so visiting tourists can also use the public transport. This isn't lack of speaking the language as well, it is more about not wanting to speak another language because "In Deutschland muss man Deutsch sprechen." It is reaching French level of racism at this point. Funny for a country that wants to attract so many international expats.
This assume that a country should please english-speaking tourists but not everyone speaks that language. Here our perception is biased because we're in a english-speaking-forum. Tourism isn't a central concern for many people/countries and not supporting it is a valid choice.
> French level of racism
Racism really ??? As a Parisian I'll struggle to make tourists feel unpleasant but I assure you there's absolutely nothing to do with race. French from outside the capital get the same treatment, they just happen to understand our insults.
English is the international language. It is mandatory to learn it as the second language in most parts of the world, even places you never heard of. It is especially a no-brainer for a person who grew up in Germany(which is one of the most developed countries in the world, and definitely has the means to educate its own people). Again, this is a problem of choice. And since Germany is a country that relies on importing educated people to keep its economy afloat, choices like these are self-sabotaging.
This isn't an english-speaking-forum, its an international one. That is the reason English is being spoken.
I get why the French is still angry about this issue and refuses to speak English, since it isn't French that is considered the international language, but English.
I wouldn't expect a French to understand this though.
France can be afforded such idiosyncrasies because the French are generally rational thinking people, not clockwork slaves to a bureaucratic machine like Germans are made to be by their culture.
[flagged]
Lingua Franca predates colonialism. Latin predates Lingua Franca, although one can argue Latin was forced down due to the Roman Empire's extensive reach and size. Ancient Greek also served a similar role. One doesn't need to learn each others language as long as they all know one common language. One could argue for Esperanto, or a purely symbolic language like traffic icons, but you need to learn that one too. So it makes more sense to use a fit for purpose language for travel that has no ambiguities. You can even create a graph that can be queried. There's all sorts of ways to solve this with as little pain as possible as long as you care to. And wanting people to just learn the local language to traverse a transport network is chauvinism.
1 reply →
If you visited Japan as a tourist, I believe you learned enough to say hello, ask someone where your hotel is, and so on. I don’t for a second believe you learned enough to understand arbitrary train network change announcements. Unless you spend years studying the language before visiting any country as a tourist, which would be absurd.
1 reply →
Because English has become the lingua franca for Europe. I suspect that now UK has left EU it will be much easier to accept this.
I still lean on UK English though, regarding way of writing and words I tend to use.
Personally I worry about the Maltese/Irish supremacy that will arise as a result.
More seriously, I suspect that
> Since the exit of the United Kingdom from the EU in 2020, the government of France has encouraged greater use of French as a working language
will hasten the move to English in official proceedings. Almost 44% of the population understand it already, and it’s unclear why the teens of the EU who already speak near-perfect English would want to learn French other than for recreation.
Wasn't that meant to be Esperanto? /s
Sure, but it never caught on. Not sure the point of your “/s” sign, since what you’re claiming is in fact true, and if it’s a joke it’s not a particularly funny one.
Because it's going to the airport and so might be full of travellers and tourists?
To be fair, it’s announced in the platform screens in a language abstract way, by indicating the destination and the platform segments (A,B vs C,D) to take to reach the destination.
The key is that on hundred of trains around the world this is done to indicate the convenience - these doors will be closer, etc.
Trains splitting in half are rare enough that THAT is what needs to be described.
The US equivalent is the empire builder which splits in Spokane (I believe) but it’s much more old fashioned and you have a tag above your seat showing your destination- if you somehow end up on the wrong car the conductor will wake you up and move you to the right one.
A similar one that can catch you (and has caught me) are express elevators or the two-story ones which mean you only can stop at even or odd floors depending on where you got on.
Unpopular opinion: you should learn the absolute basics of the language used in the country you are travelling to.
Seriously? That unpopular? Lmfao.
Not only unpopular, but pretty daft too. If you think the basics of a language should include "this train will separate into two at station X, please sit in the front Y carriages to get to Z" then enjoy doing a cross-Europe trip.
7 replies →
Basics for a casual traveller are 'hello, 'please', 'thank you', 'two beers', 'can I have the bill', and 'I'll take the schnitzel please'.
Perfectly understanding rapidly-spoken German explaining something esoteric about the splitting of a train is magnitudes, years of study beyond casual traveller level.
Going from the Netherlands to Budapest I started my journey with Deutsche Bahn. My train also did the split in half and go different directions trick. Was I supposed to learn Dutch, German, and Hungarian in order to buy my train tickets?
6 replies →
I took French for 5 years and I don't think I learned enough to understand a tannoy announcement that the train was being split into two parts. Tannoy announcements aren't the easiest to understand even for native speakers.
1 reply →
Knowing the basics is knowing how to salute, thanks, ask basic directions. You can't ask everyone to know every single language they visit and be able to understand stuff mentionned in a foreign language in a possibly noisy environment and from an only half decent speaker system.
> Unpopular opinion: you should learn the absolute basics of the language used in the country you are travelling to.
As a German I disagree with this. Europe is a single market, we want to have people getting around crossing borders at all times to get stuff done. It pays to make things easier.
If you're going for a three-weeks leisure trip, sure, learn how to say hi and thank-you.
In India train announcements in stations are made in the regional language, English and Hindi.
I most most places to English. Honestly it should be default to have the local language and English.
Belgium gave me one of the more annoying train experiences when I was a younger man. I was in Leuven for a conference, and had decided to bring my then girlfriend (now wife) for a trip, after which we would take the Eurostar to London. On the ticket, it said Brussels-Midi, but after happily boarding the train, we only saw the following related options on the train map for stops:
1. Brussel-Noord
2. Brussel-Centraal
3. Brussel-Zuid
So here we were, not speaking the language, rushing for a train that we were at risk of being late for, and not having a clear idea of the actual stop to get off of.
And the people on the train? Totally unhelpful. "Eurostar"? Shrug. "Train to London?" Blank looks.
Anyway we winged it and made it, but still a damn stupid set up if you want to be welcoming to tourists (and their money).
Was it Centraal? That would have been my guess.
Nope, the biggest station is actually Midi/Zuid.
Hah nope! Even as a Belgian I find the naming of the Brussels train stations maddening. Brussels-Midi is the south station, so Brussel-Zuid. Midi allegedly means south in French, but I've never actually heard it being used over "sud", also south.
In conversation, midi also means noon (e.g. used as "meet me at noon"), which for my brain correlates more with central than south, given the context of a day.
Not a linguist, so what do I know, maybe someone else can chime in.
4 replies →
Brussels in particular perhaps is sort of non-intuitive because, even (or perhaps especially) if you know a little bit of French, the station names don't obviously correlate to their relative locations. There is a logic but it's not obvious to someone not used to it--and, honestly, I'd have to go online to figure it out again.
I was in Belgium going to Antwerp and sometimes the French name -- Anvers -- was used. At least in e.g. Valais in CH cities that have dual names are shown with both, e.g. Sierre/Siders.
[dead]