If I had a euro for everytime someone has said to me “Everone in Germany speaks English,” I could probably pay for several nice dinners by now. It’s a myth that has become an accepted fact, I guess, sort of like those urban legend emails that pop up in your email inbox. While you can’t check the validity of this one on Snopes.com, you can take it from me:  not everyone in Germany speaks English.

Now, it is true that most (all?) German students study English in school. OK, so how many of you studied a language in school? Can I see a show of hands? Now, please leave your hands raised if you can really speak that language now.

‘Nuff said, eh?

Seriously, I called a federal government office that is design to help foreigners who move to Germany. I had a question about how to do the necessary government paperwork before we moved, and thought perhaps they could help. I don’t speak German, so of course I had to ask if there was someone I could speak with in the office who spoke English. And in that office  — again, it was an office designed to help foreigners to Germany — not a single person spoke English.

On the other hand, it has been true that we have found some folks here who do speak English, which has been handy when Chris isn’t available, and/or doesn’t have the right German vocabulary for a particular set of paperwork (mostly, he does very well, though – thanks, Chris, for doing all the talking at this stage!).

But not everybody who we’ve dealt with in the officese, stores, etc. has spoken any English. In fact, at the first grocery store we went to, I was trying to buy some peaches and had a bit of a problem. Figuring out how to buy produce in a German supermarket has been tricky – not every supermarket system is the same here, apparently, and it isn’t always like it was in Italy. I’ll have to do more of a post about that at some point, once I figure more stuff out.

In any case, that first time, a woman was offering free samples of the peaches. So I tried them, they weren’t bad, and I decided to buy a couple. In the subsequent exchange about buying them, she told me a bunch of stuff in German, of which I understood very little, and definitely not enough to sort out what I was supposed to do in order to bag up and buy some peaches. She then asked if I spoke any other language – and proceded to reel off a list of many languages. Italian was on the list, and so we wound up completing that conversation in Italian, although her Italian was mostly Spanish, but at least it was close enough. But crucially  her list of languages was impressive, but it did not in fact include English.

I’m happy to report that my German classes officially start today. Everybody here does speak German, after all. 😉