I spent a long time in the UK and currently live in Czechia.

In the UK if you stood in a group conversation and weren’t saying anything, people tried to involve you and asked you questions. In Czechia, unless you said something, you would be ignored*. I know this is kind of an odd thing to consider but I’ve determined it’s the one thing that decides if I’m able to find actual close friends in a society. Because I’ve spent several years here (am Czech) and although I’ve made acquaintances I’ve never met anyone who was more interested to get to know me than I was to get to know them. This has left me feeling lonely.

So in order to know where else I’d fit in, I’d be curious to know how this hypothetical situation would play out in your country. I know the dividing line must be somewhere between UK and CZ but don’t know where. When I visited Eastern Germany and spoke German it was only marginally better than Czechia.

*So when trying to make conversation, all the effort had to come from your side (which gets tiring). In the UK you could feel that the other person was trying to help carry the conversation too. And actually, I’ve found this happens when non native speakers switch to English too (eg. when Erasmus people came)

  • PonyOfWarEnglish
    4•2 months ago

    Germany is much like Czechia in that regard. There is a slight regional divide where people in the south are a bit more amicable than in the north. No comparison to the UK though. Recently visited there for 2 weeks and found it incredibly easy to just have friendly conversations with random people. On the other end, Denmark was probably the coldest I’ve visited in terms of people. Still friendly, but very to the point, with basically no chance to strike up a random conversation.