Originally Posted by
Tourist in MSN
I did a week long bike trip through REI travel, Prague to Budapest. They took care of all the lodging and most meals. One of our group congratulated our guide at being fluent at so many languages, he explained he could not speak Hungarian, but that he could speak German and most of the Hungarians that he met could understand German well enough for him to get by. But he did explain that Hungarian language has similarities to Finnish.
I am a native Dutch speaker.
I have what I call my "fake German" - that mostly consists of trying a mixture of the few German words I know, Dutch words with German accents and English words with German accents. I am always surprised at well it seems to work in communication in Germany. I'm sure they laugh at me, but do seem to understand what I am saying.
However, one of my more spectacular language fails came in northern Poland. In this area I believe Polish was the most predominant language, with German a strong second and English/Russian varying a bit more depending on age.
- My fake German really didn't work here
- English was a distant language not spoken by as many people I met in the countryside (perhaps more today but this was 2007)
- I had studied Russian but not quite enough to get by
- I hadn't picked up much Polish prior to coming since I was only going to be in Poland for ~5 days
It was an interesting struggle, but I did muddle my way through things.