I met a cleaning lady in London who couldn’t speak English.
It happened last year in a nice hotel, and I found out as tried to ask for a towel.
Tbh it was kind of funny to think about it later, the one place you would not expect this to happen is London, yet it’s the most logical place that this would happen due to the insanely high demand for workers for these jobs.
I wouldn’t really stress the “a lot” there, really.
You won’t have to go far to find an English speaking country in Europe as there are over 370 million English speakers out of about 450 million EU residents!
Granted that is the EU, not Europe in general, but it’s also people in general, of all ages, and not adult people who work a service job. Sure, in some backwater Russian town that is technically in Europe you might have a problem with getting understood in English, but “problem” is “Проблема” in Russian. And that reads as “problema”. “Toilet” is “Туалет” = “tualet”.
So I really can’t imagine a scenario in which you can’t communicate “a problem with the toilet” without dragging someone in to the loo and shoving their face in your pile.
Well, if we reduce the requirements from knowing English to being able to understand “toilet! problem!” then of course.
Non-english speakers are not evenly distributed in different countries, that is why it still depends a lot on where you are searching, and in places where there’s almost no demand for speaking English, there will be much less people working in services speaking English.
For instance, you can take a look at Wikipedia’s list of countries by English speaking population, Italy has ≈13% of speakers, Spain has ≈22%, Bulgaria, Hungary, Slovakia, and Portugal all fall between 25–27%%
And it’s not like you can just go and every fourth will be speaking English fluently, I would expect most of them to be in big cities or capitals.
I liked when Bert told this one better in his comedy routine. I saw it on YouTube because it’s everywhere.
While that may be a link would be much appreciated.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAEASKgfTrI
First off pretending there’s an actual language barrier in Europe where everyone in a service job speaks English is quite dated.
I met a cleaning lady in London who couldn’t speak English.
It happened last year in a nice hotel, and I found out as tried to ask for a towel.
Tbh it was kind of funny to think about it later, the one place you would not expect this to happen is London, yet it’s the most logical place that this would happen due to the insanely high demand for workers for these jobs.
Oh, that would depend a lot on what country you’re in
I wouldn’t really stress the “a lot” there, really.
Granted that is the EU, not Europe in general, but it’s also people in general, of all ages, and not adult people who work a service job. Sure, in some backwater Russian town that is technically in Europe you might have a problem with getting understood in English, but “problem” is “Проблема” in Russian. And that reads as “problema”. “Toilet” is “Туалет” = “tualet”.
So I really can’t imagine a scenario in which you can’t communicate “a problem with the toilet” without dragging someone in to the loo and shoving their face in your pile.
Well, if we reduce the requirements from knowing English to being able to understand “toilet! problem!” then of course.
Non-english speakers are not evenly distributed in different countries, that is why it still depends a lot on where you are searching, and in places where there’s almost no demand for speaking English, there will be much less people working in services speaking English.
For instance, you can take a look at Wikipedia’s list of countries by English speaking population, Italy has ≈13% of speakers, Spain has ≈22%, Bulgaria, Hungary, Slovakia, and Portugal all fall between 25–27%%
And it’s not like you can just go and every fourth will be speaking English fluently, I would expect most of them to be in big cities or capitals.
Wow, the UK and Turkey (I’m not spelling it that way) have the same proficiency in English! /s