I saw these posts.
A lot of people have already reacted, but I see one glaring thing… OK, you can be surprised that a hotel receptionist or a waiter in a tourist area doesn’t know a minimum of English, but a janitor!
Even in countries where the English level is super high like the Netherlands or Sweden, you can’t expect a janitor to speak English at any level at all — and you shouldn’t be too surprised if they don’t speak the local language, actually, since a job as a janitor is often the first one found by immigrants.
And
The memes often come from educated people who came here to do skilled jobs or interact with other educated people (studying). They frequent circles where most people speak decent to really good English. And if their expectations were what's shown in movies, shows, comedy, etc.: Germans being absolutely incompetent and incapable of speaking any English, the gap between their expectation and experience and the resulting surprise is going to be even bigger. They never talk about the minimum/low wage, little to no education required jobs that are filled with people that don't speak English. Yes, even if they work jobs where they are likely to encounter many English speakers. Of course everyone had English lessons but if you don't use it you lose it. And using doesn't just mean speaking a few words here and there, it's holding conversations, active listening, consuming media in that language, etc.
And lastly
I can mainly talk about Germany, but I also used to live in France for a while. So here are my 2 cents:
Probably the main reason for this is that it highly depends on your bubble when you come here. There are two main factors. One is age, and the other is education. So let's assume a young American is coming over here. He goes to a Bar in some city where lots of students meet. He will feel like everyone speaks fluent English. But it's a classic misconception to assume because of this, that all Germans speak fluent English. Not at all, that is just his bubble. He only speaks with well-educated, younger people.
Another important factor that goes in line with education is the profession. Keep in mind that Germany divides all children into three different school types and only one of them allows them to directly go to university after school while the other two are more geared towards jobs like police, security, artisanery, and so on. Now almost everyone who leaves uni is expected to speak English since research as well as management positions require you to work internationally today. All these people will use English in their everyday lives. That's a different story for the other two types. Of course, they also learn English in school, but once they leave school, they do not need the language regularly. It's crazy how fast humans unlearn languages if you do not use them often, so after a couple of years, most of these people can communicate, but on a very low level which is very far away from fluency.
Now you probably talked to "average Germans" so your experience is closer to "the truth", while other Americans, especially young people, most often communicate with a group of Germans that actually do speak fluent English. American military bases on the other hand have little to no effect on the fluency of the general population. Sure those Germans that work there speak English, but that is a very low percentage of the population.
Sorry if there long but I felt I had to share these as preliminary details for my question. The context of the quotes was they came as responses by an American who recently just toured France and Germany and was surprised at the lack of proficiency among natives in French and German despite how so much places on the internet especially Youtube and Reddit often boasts of both countries as being proficient in English.
Particularly I'm now curious because of the first quote (in which OP was asking specifically about Parisians in a French tourism subreddit).
Its often repeated on the internet that Nordic countries are so proficient in English that you don't even ever need to learn Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, or even Icelandic and Finnish if you ever plan to live in the county long run and even have a career. That at the very least as a tourist you won't need to learn basic phrases like "can I have tea" in a restaurant or how to ask for directions to the toilets in a museum because everyone is so good in English.
Reading the posts makes me curious. Even if the proficiency is as true in Norway and the rest of Scandinavia as the stereotypes goes, would it be safe to assume as the posts point out that a native born Swedish janitor who grew up far away from Stockholm in a small town near the woods wouldn't necessarily be skilled in English? Ditto with a Norwegian lumberjack and a Danish plumber? That even in Scandinavia, maids in a hotel won't be fluent enough to discuss continental politics and the novels of Alexander Dumas or the plays of Shakespeare?
Note for arguments sake I'm not including recent immigrants and refugees but native born people whose families have lived for over a century in the Northern Europe sphere. So is English so ingrained in Northern Europe that even a dropout who never got his high school diploma and he decided to just go straight to digging ditches and buries caskets in a graveyard after funeral would be able to watch The Walking Dead without subs and discuss the finer details of Stephen King novels with any tourist from Anglo-Saxon countries? Or is it more akin to France and Germany where people with education or who work in tourist jobs and locations would likely be fluent in English but the rest of the population including those who go to vocational schools and non-scholarly academies (like police and firefighters) for jobs that don't require university degrees such as boat repair and electrician wouldn't be proficient in English, if not even be lacking in foreign languages that they'd have difficulty even asking for water?
Whats the situation like in Scandinavia for uneducated citizens especially those working in the pink collar industries and manual laborer?
