5 ms·

I had the impression that is quite hard to survive in Germany just with English.

• sentenza 13y ago
  It depends on what you mean by survive. If you work in an academic context, you will get by with English for work purposes just fine. I personally know various PhD students, postdocs and professors that use only English in their work life. There are, of course exceptions. I could imagine that you might run into trouble in a very small university (as in only teaches brewery engineering) or in a medium-sized university in east Germany. As to general life, it depends. In population centers you usually always find somebody who speaks English. In rural areas, it might be a bit more difficult. My recommendation is: If you don't understand or can't make yourself understood, just look for somebody below the age of 30 and you will soon enough find an ad-hoc translator. Nonetheless, if you want to inmerse yourself in the culture and feel "at home", you have to learn the language. This, however, is the case for every place on the planet.