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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]This is just my observation and you might disagree.

I used to travel a lot before Covid, and now I’m traveling in Europe for the first time since 2019. Previously, I was always conditioned to believe that it was an “ugly American” thing to do to assume everyone should speak English and not try to use as much of the local language as you can.

My impressions are that over the years this has changed, especially for younger people. Since English is globally the unofficial international language, most people you interact with in Europe will know it to some degree. I have noticed that other Europeans are more likely to default to English with one another, unless they are fluent in a mutual, local language, whereas American tourists are more likely to muddle through a basic sentence in a local language. It seems like, at least in tourism-dominated, major cities, people would prefer you to just use English. While they may show superficial appreciation for your attempts at their language, they probably would rather just speak fluent English with you than waste their time listening to a terrible attempt at their own language. Unless you are FLUENT.

But of course, I could be wrong. [/quote]

Two things can be right at the same time.

The “ugly American” attitude you mentioned is about Americans blasting English to natives without even asking if that’s ok. Without a “excuse me, do you speak English and can you help me?”

It’s more “excuse me, which way is downtown?”. And that can be annoying.[/quote]

Fair point. Although I have noticed younger Europeans going immediately to English, it’s probably in primarily tourist centers and larger cities. It really does though seem that American tourists have been the most apologetic and trying to hide where they are from, especially from 2016-2021 [/quote]

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