Running this hotel we meet people not only from all over Europe but a fair chunk of the world in general. And of course we do our best to communicate with those guests in whichever language they speak; we have a small tower of dictionaries – english/italian, english/german, english/spanish and even english/dutch (even though the majority of Dutch speak pretty good english).
The Scandinavians almost without exception speak a fair degree of english which saves us the agony of trying to pronounce those difficult nordic syllables.
In general we have found that speaking French to the French works best and so on with Spanish and Italian. Very often though if they can manage some english words they will do so – I think they like to show us that they can speak our language better than we can speak theirs but it dosen’t always work well and can often slow things down communications-wise if their english is not the best. But it is nice of them to try…
Recently we had a group of German guests stay (yes, I remember Basil Fawlty’s advice and did not mention ‘it’) and they were all fluent english speakers so were happy to communicate likewise. Unfortunately one lady in the group was rather ‘put out’ and, for some crazy reason, complained that we did not make any effort to speak French to her…
Speak French to German guests…? sounds crazy I know, but she was really quite miffed about it. Shows how far things have come in the past 60 years though I guess…however try speaking German to French guests and they would walk straight out the door!
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