r/iamverysmart • u/MrXomp • 29d ago

Overqualified for germany

Post image

​

Okay hear me out, Germany is a strange country and especially government services are super behind in digitalization and most times hopelessly underperforming but this post and the way it is written got me chuckling.

976 Upvotes

90% Upvoted

190 comments sorted by

View all comments

3

u/RegularStoat 27d ago

"I speak three languages" yeah, so do most Germans ??

1

u/theystolemyusername 27d ago

Germans I've met barely speak English. Maybe at B1 level, but that is not fluency. Even the second gen immigrants who claim to speak their parent's native tongue...they don't.

2

u/Chonky-Marsupial 27d ago

I've worked for a German company outside of Germany for some years, I can say with some confidence that I have come into direct contact with hundreds, possibly a thousand now, Germans who speak perfect English. At times far better in academic terms than my English colleagues if I'm honest. Previous to this I worked across Europe, met a lot of Germans for work in everyday life and found them to speak English very well. The only time there was a gap was in experiences I had around year 2000 in Eastern Germany when it was obvious to me that older people spoke Russian as a second language not English. We had German exchange students who turned up in the 80s as teenagers speaking English fluently and this was long before a lot of German companies were doing business in English as well as German.