Fluent in Nothing, Welcome Everywhere

🇮🇳 India 🇮🇱 Israel

By Suki Nakamura, Out of Office

India keeps twenty-two languages on its official constitutional list and roughly four hundred more in active use, which means that by the time you've worked out whether you're being addressed in Marathi or Malayalam, the conversation has already moved on without you. Israel, by contrast, picked one language and legislated it into the Basic Law with the swagger of a nation that has never once doubted itself, then built an entire start-up economy that quietly assumes everyone speaks English anyway, right up until the exact moment you need a plumber.

Both countries will tell you, with total sincerity, that you'll be fine with English. Both countries are lying to you in different, equally entertaining ways. India is lying because English genuinely works in the five cities that matter to you and collapses the instant you leave them. Israel is lying because English works brilliantly in a Tel Aviv co-working space and evaporates completely at the Ministry of Interior counter. I have been defeated by both, in person, with witnesses.

Do's & Don'ts: India

Do's & Don'ts: Israel

India: A Thousand Tongues and One Universal Shrug

India's language situation is not a barrier so much as a weather system, and like weather, it changes dramatically depending on where you've decided to stand. The 2011 Census found that 10.2 percent of India's population — some 128.5 million people — reported speaking English as a first, second, or third language, and that figure does a staggering amount of work for a country this size. In Mumbai, Bangalore, or the smarter postcodes of Delhi, English isn't a foreign language at all; it's the office language, the dating-app language, the language your landlord's lawyer uses to quietly fleece you. You can run an entire expat life in English and never notice the other 1.3 billion people around you have a different mother tongue. Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu top the state rankings for raw English-speaker counts, which tells you everything about where the comfortable expat bubbles cluster and absolutely nothing about the country you think you've moved to.

Then you leave the five cities, and the shrug begins. Travellers on expat forums describe exactly this pattern: fine in the big cities, fine with Uber, fine with hotel staff — and then genuinely stranded in Vadodara or rural Himachal Pradesh, where "I don't speak Hindi" is met with more Hindi, spoken slightly louder, as though volume were the missing variable. One expat living with a hearing impairment in Gujarat found that locals default instantly back to Hindi or Gujarati the moment English fails, regardless of what you've just told them about yourself. It isn't malice. It's a country with twenty-two scheduled languages where everyone is already doing linguistic triage all day, and you are simply one more variable to route around. Expats in Goa and Shimla report a gentler version of the same story, where a mix of Konkani, Hindi, and tourist-economy English covers most needs, but even there, the moment you wander off the main road, you're back to pointing at menu items and hoping.

What nobody tells you is that this isn't India failing to communicate — it's India communicating constantly, in eight directions at once, and English happening to be the one lane you can see. Learn fifty numbers, the phrase for "how much," and the local script for place names, and the weather system becomes almost pleasant. Skip that step and you'll spend your first six months being quietly, cheerfully, catastrophically overcharged.

Israel: The Start-Up Nation That Forgot to Translate the Supermarket

Israel's pitch is seductive: Hebrew is the official language, sure, but this is the Start-Up Nation, everyone under forty has a cousin in Palo Alto, and the whole economy runs on English-language investor decks. For about the first three weeks, this pitch holds up beautifully. Then you try to pay for petrol, and the self-service screen has no English option, and the woman behind you in the queue is not interested in your feelings about this.

The numbers back up the whiplash. A 2017 Central Bureau of Statistics survey found that 38 percent of Israelis aged sixteen to sixty-five lack basic English skills, and 13 percent reported knowing none at all — a startling figure for a country so thoroughly branded as the global tech capital. English is real, but it's concentrated: it's the language of the office, not the grocery store; the pitch meeting, not the parent-teacher conference. A recent Israel Hayom column made exactly this point, listing Hebrew-only payment terminals, Hebrew-only train announcements, and English signage that mysteriously appears only at the airport, as if the state's official position is that tourists deserve clarity for exactly nineteen minutes upon arrival and not one minute more. Hebrew's status was further cemented by the 2018 Basic Law, which names it "the State's language" outright, while English isn't an official language at all and hasn't been since a 1948 ordinance quietly removed it — a legal footnote that most newcomers discover only once it's too late to matter.

For new immigrants, the stakes rise considerably. Government bureaucracy — the forms, the Bituach Leumi appointments, the endless ministry queues — runs almost entirely in Hebrew, and Israel's free ulpan courses, while generous, routinely leave people able to order coffee but not decode a legal letter. Nearly twenty-two thousand new immigrants arrived in 2025 alone, every one of them discovering that "the start-up nation" and "the country that will process your residency paperwork in English" are not the same country at all. And then there's the social register: Israelis will correct your Hebrew constantly, unprompted, mid-sentence, and mean it as kindness. It takes new arrivals an embarrassingly long time to stop hearing that as an insult, and roughly as long to realise that in a country of four million Hebrew speakers and a Russian-speaking minority nudging twenty percent, English was never going to be more than a courtesy extended to guests.

The Verdict

If you want the comforting illusion of a global language, India wins on sheer surface area — more people speak English there in absolute terms than anywhere outside the United States, and you can build a perfectly functional bubble life around that fact. But India's bubble is honest about being a bubble; step outside the postcode and you know immediately you've left English behind, because the signage, the shopkeepers, and the entire soundscape have changed with you.

Israel's bubble is the more dangerous one, because it's advertised as not being a bubble at all. You're told this is a globally fluent, English-fluent, internationally plugged-in society, and then the Ministry of Interior hands you a form in Hebrew with a straight face. India will openly confuse you. Israel will confidently mislead you, and somehow make you feel it's your fault for not already knowing Hebrew by week two. Confusion I can forgive. Gaslighting dressed as hospitality, less so. If forced to choose a country to be lost in, I'll take the one that's upfront about having lost me.

What Nobody Warned You About

expat.com India forum — paraphrased: a hearing-impaired expat in Vadodara, Gujarat describes how locals revert to Hindi or Gujarati the instant English runs out, regardless of what you've already told them about your situation.

expat.com Israel forum — paraphrased: one long-term resident admits you can "probably get away with never having to learn Hebrew" in Tel Aviv, yet still finds routine phone calls to Israeli companies nearly impossible without it.

easyaliyah.com immigration blog — paraphrased: new immigrants frequently finish their free ulpan course able to make small talk, but still unable to parse the legal or bureaucratic Hebrew in a government form or a lease.

Conclusion

Neither country owes you English, and both countries know it, which is precisely why they're so cheerfully unbothered by your confusion. India's four hundred-odd languages make the barrier obvious from the moment you land — you simply adjust, learn the numbers, and get on with it. Israel's barrier hides behind a tech-hub reputation so convincing that you won't notice it until a government clerk is sliding a Hebrew-only form across the counter and watching you fail in real time. My verdict, delivered the way I deliver everything, without diplomacy: learn the fifty numbers for India, book the ulpan for Israel, and stop expecting either country to perform your comprehension for you. They have better things to do, and so, eventually, will you.