It depends. I live in Zürich and I get by just fine unable to speak German. I can read it just fine because it is similar enough to Swedish, my native language

It depends. I live in Zürich and I get by just fine unable to speak German. I can read it just fine because it is similar enough to Swedish, my native language. I doubt I will ever learn Swiss deutsch, it really is a language on its own - with very strong dialects. But today there are amazing translator apps that can make it so much easier parsing official documents.