Cavesa wrote:In general, the native German speakers tend to know much better French than vice versa, so people say that many such situations end up in French! I hear all the time francophones saying stuff like "oh, I had German at school, I should be officially B2. But I've forgotten it all and hope to never use it again!", which is pretty sad in a plurilingual country. The italophones usually also speak either French or German, even though I have no doubts there will be many monolinguals too, I see just a rather specific sample.
The Swiss are the best at expecting French from immigrants and pretty good at expecting it from other foreigners here too. It is not perfect, of course, but much better than in France or Belgium. So, I am a bit surprised to hear this from you, but you are not the only person telling me. I simply don't encounter it so much. Clearly, a longer time of observation is needed.
Yeah, I have no clue what it's like over there, as I've never set foot west of Basel or Wallis. That's pretty much my experience with the German speakers here, though, as soon as my German was good enough that they stopped automatically switching to English. We're expected to learn German and to understand Swiss German, even if they don't want us to learn to speak it, and they really look down on people who have been here more than 5-10 years and can't speak it. But French to them it's something they're forced to learn in school, it's hated, and many of them willingly forget what they've learned. Many find English easier than French, so maybe that's where we have this feeling of English being preferred. There is a large population who can speak French, but, just as many German speakers do with English, they claim they only know a little bit, despite being conversationally fluent, or at least. But, take into consideration that I live in Ostschweiz, nearly as far from bilingual cantons as you can get.
But yay for apartment finding! Congrats!
I had a bit higher expectations here, but it was not bad.
