Highly depends on the country. Go to Sweden and you'll have a hard time even practicing Swedish, as soon as the natives discover you're also not a native, they'll switch to English immediately in most places of the country.
On the other hand, go to Spain outside the metropolitan areas and besides the youth, most people won't understand and can't speak English.
Then you have places like France, where even if many of them know English, they'll just refuse to speak English, unless it's an emergency, then English comes out of them with no problem. Then some French tourists also like to travel down to the North of Spain and try to talk French with us, for some reason. I cannot even count these occurrences on one hand anymore.
It really depends on the country and maybe more importantly, rural vs metropolitan areas.
Besides, humans are surprisingly good at communicating just with our hands, faces and pointing at stuff, you can definitively get by as a tourist in a country without sharing any spoken languages, and after a few days you'll both learn some of the basic words of their language, and "shortcuts" for pointing/hand-waving through what you want, making the whole thing a lot easier :)
I was in rural Northeast Spain one time and a French lady tried to get me to help her communicate with a Spanish storekeeper. Given that I only speak bits of Spanish and basically no French, and I seemed to have to the most bilingual skill of the three of us, we had a pretty hard time communicating. I'm still not exactly sure what the French lady wanted, and my vague understanding of what the Spanish person said was, "I can't be bothered with this."
The easiest place in France I've traveled as an English speaker was Nice. They all speak English well and don't seem to care if you don't speak French.
Ahh France. I was in Paris trying to order a sandwich.
I asked: "Parlez-vous anglais?"
Them: "Non!" (rudely and went back to what they were doing)
I then tried explain in my very butchered french I learned in elementary school:
"Jambon du pain et...."
And they immediately turned back with a big smile on their face:
"What would you like?"
It seems the fact I knew some paltry french and I was trying was enough. A strange but nice experience.
Who knows, I guess music, film, TV and video games, like most of us who learned English outside of English-native speaking countries. School classes helps for sure, but I'd wager most people who speak good English learned it from multimedia one way or another.
Also relevant to note that some European countries dub everything while others sub. That no doubt plays a part in the population’s understanding of foreign languages.
> and "shortcuts" for pointing/hand-waving through what you want
To expand on this idea, there are books designed specifically for travels which are pocket sized and contain a bunch of images so you can point at what you want.
It's no problem. At least in Spain, Portugal and Türkiye as an English speaker. I spent a few weeks solo traveling in those countries.
Sure you will encounter folks who don't speak English but you'll be surprised at how far body language can go along with understanding less than 10 words of their language. If it's important there's Google translate too.
But it's more fun without it. Years later I still have nice memories of chatting with a clerk at a small store to buy laundry detergent for washing clothes in a sink where neither of us knew each other's language. After 10 minutes of laughing and miming out the action of washing clothes we found a good powder that was safe for colored clothes, optimized for sink washing.
last time in Italy I "spoke" to lots of Italians very slowly with lots of gestures and a little bit of google translate, it was awesome and I learnt a lot! Nearly ordered 100x as much cheese as I meant to except the guy in the shop was not a computer so he understood what I really meant. Much better than in the Netherlands where they just switch to English as soon as they hear you try to say choodumorchen
I speak three European languages, and English worked almost always. Especially the younger folks in the cities. If it didn't work, I used a translation app.
Highly depends on the country. Go to Sweden and you'll have a hard time even practicing Swedish, as soon as the natives discover you're also not a native, they'll switch to English immediately in most places of the country.
On the other hand, go to Spain outside the metropolitan areas and besides the youth, most people won't understand and can't speak English.
Then you have places like France, where even if many of them know English, they'll just refuse to speak English, unless it's an emergency, then English comes out of them with no problem. Then some French tourists also like to travel down to the North of Spain and try to talk French with us, for some reason. I cannot even count these occurrences on one hand anymore.
It really depends on the country and maybe more importantly, rural vs metropolitan areas.
Besides, humans are surprisingly good at communicating just with our hands, faces and pointing at stuff, you can definitively get by as a tourist in a country without sharing any spoken languages, and after a few days you'll both learn some of the basic words of their language, and "shortcuts" for pointing/hand-waving through what you want, making the whole thing a lot easier :)
I was in rural Northeast Spain one time and a French lady tried to get me to help her communicate with a Spanish storekeeper. Given that I only speak bits of Spanish and basically no French, and I seemed to have to the most bilingual skill of the three of us, we had a pretty hard time communicating. I'm still not exactly sure what the French lady wanted, and my vague understanding of what the Spanish person said was, "I can't be bothered with this."
The easiest place in France I've traveled as an English speaker was Nice. They all speak English well and don't seem to care if you don't speak French.
Ahh France. I was in Paris trying to order a sandwich. I asked: "Parlez-vous anglais?" Them: "Non!" (rudely and went back to what they were doing) I then tried explain in my very butchered french I learned in elementary school: "Jambon du pain et...." And they immediately turned back with a big smile on their face: "What would you like?"
It seems the fact I knew some paltry french and I was trying was enough. A strange but nice experience.
> even if many of them know English, they'll just refuse to speak English
How they keep their English speaking "in shape" then?
Who knows, I guess music, film, TV and video games, like most of us who learned English outside of English-native speaking countries. School classes helps for sure, but I'd wager most people who speak good English learned it from multimedia one way or another.
Also relevant to note that some European countries dub everything while others sub. That no doubt plays a part in the population’s understanding of foreign languages.
> and "shortcuts" for pointing/hand-waving through what you want
To expand on this idea, there are books designed specifically for travels which are pocket sized and contain a bunch of images so you can point at what you want.
It's no problem. At least in Spain, Portugal and Türkiye as an English speaker. I spent a few weeks solo traveling in those countries.
Sure you will encounter folks who don't speak English but you'll be surprised at how far body language can go along with understanding less than 10 words of their language. If it's important there's Google translate too.
But it's more fun without it. Years later I still have nice memories of chatting with a clerk at a small store to buy laundry detergent for washing clothes in a sink where neither of us knew each other's language. After 10 minutes of laughing and miming out the action of washing clothes we found a good powder that was safe for colored clothes, optimized for sink washing.
last time in Italy I "spoke" to lots of Italians very slowly with lots of gestures and a little bit of google translate, it was awesome and I learnt a lot! Nearly ordered 100x as much cheese as I meant to except the guy in the shop was not a computer so he understood what I really meant. Much better than in the Netherlands where they just switch to English as soon as they hear you try to say choodumorchen
I speak three European languages, and English worked almost always. Especially the younger folks in the cities. If it didn't work, I used a translation app.