So you’re here in Germany and you want to find a place where you can really hang out and let loose with the locals. But you’re either apprehensive about the language barrier or you just don’t even know where to go to get yourself started when it comes to meeting your neighbors. Here are a few tips and tricks that we’ve learned over the years to get your foot in the door and on your way to great relationships with your neighbors and making new friends.

Forget your fears

Let me start by saying that if you are keeping yourself at home alone at night and eating frozen dinners because you are too intimidated to get out there and mingle — take all those feelings of doubt in yourself and chuck them out the window! Seriously. I have never met any Germans that refused to talk to me because my German wasn’t good enough, because my pronunciation was off, or because I’m a crazy American that structures sentences backwards. In most cases, Germans are quite happy to help you learn better German by correcting you (which you may or may not ask them to do or like hearing) and although it can sometimes be tricky to get your point across with a limited vocabulary, if you don’t start trying, your German will never get better.  And trust me, I’m sure there are people you know or will meet that have lived here longer and speak worse German than you.

When we first moved here to Germany, our plan was to live here for 2-3 years, and then return back to the States. Obviously that plan went wildly askew (since we’ve now been here 10 years) but it was at least our intention. Those first 2-3 years, I basically became a hermit. I was living in a place where we knew no one in our immediate vicinity, I barely grasped the language and if it involved talking to someone in German, I was going to do my best to avoid it. I became an expert at looking like a understood every word coming out of your mouth and, in fact, I went through an entire 3-hour long dinner party once without the host ever catching on that I spoke very little German.

Sometimes you will find that your new friends, neighbors and colleagues want to practice their English skills on you — and that’s ok. But you are not going to learn German that way. Trust me; I’ve been there. What really helped me break down the fears was going to a language class at the VHS (Volks Hoch Schule — kind of a community college system all over Germany) and hearing people from all over the world trying to speak German (I was already level 4 by then) and realizing that I knew more and spoke better than they did. It might sound conceited, but I needed that validation for myself so that I wasn’t walking around thinking I sounded dumb or was going to get everything wrong.

Where to go

If you really want to meet the locals, I highly suggest getting a dog or having a kid. Seriously, you cannot help but interact with people when you have a dog and/or a child…and if you are pregnant, your community is going to be having that child with you. People will come up to you on the street that you’ve never seen before and talk about how it seems like yesterday that you were carrying the baby around in a chest carrier — or that you were still pregnant. Seriously, the draw of a child is even more powerful than that of a Newfie.

If you’re thinking that getting a dog or a child sounds like an awful lot of work (and it is), the next best option is just to get out there and introduce yourself. When we moved in to our here (and our last house also), we threw a housewarming party and not only invited friends and family, but also our immediate neighbors. We hadn’t really met any of them yet, and we figured since it was a good-sized party anyway, they would be able to absorb into the crowd. What we didn’t really expect was that ALL of the invited neighbors would actually drop by for at least a few minutes. But it was great to actually be able to recognize them on the street instead of just passing by each other and never saying a word. Plus if we got too rowdy, they were less likely to report us if they’d been at or were currently at the party themselves. 😉

Attending local festivals or markets (like Christmas markets) are other good ways to start warming up the locals to your presence. It depends on where you live in Germany, but in many cases, it will take a little time for people to really want to talk to you on their own. But if you are speaking English while everyone else is speaking German, people are going to know who you are. And they will speculate where you come from and what you’re doing there and so on. Just embrace it and consider yourself the new local celebrity. And know that eventually you will not be just the odd foreigners that speak backwards.

Shop local. It might sound a bit strange but if you go to the same butcher shop each week or market stand, the people working there are going to start noticing you. And you can slowly become more confident about trying out more German on them. The same applies for local restaurants. The very first thing I learned in Germany, even before we really knew we were moving here for a while, was food on menus. A girl’s gotta eat so I had to focus on what was crucial for survival! If at first you still are one of many faces in the door, don’t stress about it. Here in Hessen it takes many, many times before people start to recognize you– unless you have something memorable going on (like ordering T-bone steaks that the butcher usually takes home for himself…or a big huge Newfie is with you).

These are just a few ways to help you break the ice and start interacting with locals. What are the tricks you use to meet your neighbors, get acclimated in a new place or just try to find a way to fit in and make new friends? 

To read more about expat life in Germany and interactions with the locals, visit these other participating blogs: