Your comment about people in Germany not picking up German surprised me. I don’t have a ton of first-hand experience, but my impression has been that it was more of necessity there than other European countries.
I did more than 20 trips to Germany for work in the 1990s and early 2000s (I'm American). Of course my work colleagues there spoke good English, as did the staff at the hotels I stayed at, museums and airports, but enough people did not (shop owners, some restaurants, agents at train stations) that it really helped me to learn at least enough German to order at restaurants and shops and struggle through basic conversations; I took classes and practiced when I could. Often a mixture of my bad, limited German and the person I was speaking to's bad, limited English got things handled.
