Two Ways to Feel Illiterate Before Breakfast

🇬🇪🇩🇪 Georgia vs Germany By Suki Nakamura, Out of Office

Let's get the geography lesson out of the way, because apparently it's 2026 and people still need it: Georgia — the one with Tbilisi, the Caucasus mountains, and eight thousand years of winemaking, not the one with Atlanta, peaches, and a flag that looks like a gas station logo — has its own alphabet. Not a font. Not a stylistic flourish. An entire, independent, 33-letter writing system that owes nothing to Latin, Cyrillic, or your smug assumption that you'll "pick it up." You will not pick it up. You will stand in front of a pharmacy sign looking like a dog that's just heard a doorbell.

Germany, meanwhile, hands you the opposite trap: a language built from the same alphabet as yours, lulling you into thinking you're one Duolingo streak from fluency — right up until a grammar case system designed by a committee of sadists reminds you "the" has four genders, none of which you'll ever say with full confidence. Both countries will humble you. Only one does it with a smile and free wine.

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Do's & Don'ts

Georgia

Germany

Georgia

Here is the thing nobody tells you before you move to Tbilisi: the hard part isn't learning Georgian, it's accepting that you probably won't, not properly, not for years, and that this is fine because almost everyone has made peace with it before you. Mkhedruli, the modern Georgian script, is one of only fourteen alphabets in the world not derived from another, and UNESCO liked it enough to put the country's three historical writing systems on its Intangible Cultural Heritage list in 2016. That's not a culture being precious about its typography. That's a 1,500-year-old script doing its own thing while the rest of the world borrowed from Rome or Byzantium, and it owes you nothing in return — least of all legibility.

For decades, the workaround was Russian, a shared Soviet-era lingua franca that let you limp through a taxi ride or a clinic visit. That workaround is dying, deliberately. Since 2022's wave of Russian arrivals following the invasion of Ukraine, plenty of Tbilisi cafés and guides have started refusing Russian outright — some display signs about it, some guides now run tours only in English on principle. One Tbilisi guide put it to a journalist more bluntly than I ever could: it's currently "better to speak Mandarin than Russian" in parts of the capital. That is not a language barrier. That is a language barrier with a political border fence welded onto it, and expats who show up expecting the old Soviet shortcut are walking into a conversation they did not realise they'd started.

English fares better than it used to, concentrated almost entirely in Tbilisi's digital-nomad cafés, Batumi's tourist strip, and anywhere under thirty-five. Step outside that bubble — a village pharmacy, a regional marshutka station, a utility company's hold line — and you are back to pointing, miming, and the profound humility of a grown adult using a translation app to ask where the bathroom is. Georgians, to their enormous credit, tend to meet this with warmth rather than contempt. Mangle "gamarjoba" badly enough and you'll likely be fed, not mocked. That's the trade: the alphabet will defeat you, but the people generally won't.

Germany

Germany's language barrier is a different, more psychologically cruel beast, because it dangles familiarity before snatching it away. English and German share deep roots, half your vocabulary looks naggingly recognisable, and then you meet der/die/das, four noun cases, and verbs that wait until the end of an eight-clause sentence to reveal themselves. The EF English Proficiency Index 2025 actually ranks Germany as "very high proficiency" and climbing — The Local reported it jumping up the global table this year — which makes the on-the-ground experience more disorienting still: the English is there, right up until you need it in an office that has decided, as policy, that it isn't.

That office is the real battlefield. Germany's government-recognised Integrationskurs, run through providers overseen by the Goethe-Institut and BAMF, exists precisely because the state has concluded that living here without German is not a long-term option, and it is right. Visa renewals, tax forms, health insurance letters, the Anmeldung — Germany's maze of residency bureaucracy runs almost entirely on dense, compound-noun-riddled Beamtendeutsch that defeats native speakers, let alone learners. An InterNations Expat Insider survey, reported by The Local Germany, put the country dead last of 52 nations in its "Expat Essentials" category, the bucket that includes language and admin. One respondent to a separate Local reader survey, a Berlin resident named Ingrid, summed up the contradiction perfectly: she'd been told everyone speaks English, then discovered "no-one speaks English" the moment she actually needed something official. Dialects compound the insult — a competent B1 learner in Hamburg can still be ambushed by Bavarian or Swabian and feel like their months of study evaporated on contact.

Regional variation deserves its own warning label. The German you learn in a Berlin classroom is not the German spoken in a Munich bakery, a Cologne bar during Karneval, or a Swiss-adjacent village near Freiburg, where dialects shift vocabulary and vowels enough that even Germans from other regions quietly admit they're guessing. Learners who arrive fluent-on-paper routinely report a specific, deflating moment: ordering confidently in textbook Hochdeutsch and receiving a reply they cannot parse at all. Standard German gets you through an exam. It does not get you through a Bavarian beer tent.

The Verdict

If we're grading sheer difficulty of the language itself, Georgian wins, obviously — nobody is accidentally fluent in a script UNESCO had to protect. But "Out of Office" grades suffering, not grammar, and on suffering, Germany wins by a mile. Georgia's barrier is real but softened by a culture that rewards effort and forgives mangled attempts. Germany's barrier is smaller on paper and crueller in practice: a bureaucracy that genuinely expects fluency, officials who will not bend, and a culture where being corrected mid-sentence is supposedly a kindness — exactly the sort of thing a country says about itself while you're standing at a Bürgeramt counter being told your appointment, booked only in German, doesn't count because you ticked the wrong box.

Georgia makes you feel stupid for an afternoon and then pours you wine. Germany makes you feel stupid for years and then fines you for the paperwork you filed in the wrong order because you didn't understand the paperwork. One of these is a language barrier. The other is a personality test disguised as one, and Germany, I'm sorry to report, designed it on purpose.

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What Nobody Warned You About

expat.com forum, user TominStuttgart — says you miss far more than you'd think by not knowing German, and end up permanently dependent on other people's goodwill to get basic things done.

The Local Germany reader survey, Tanvir Rahmen Ovi (Kiel) — recalls losing his wallet and being told flatly at the lost-and-found counter, "This is Germany! No English," despite having assumed someone, somewhere, would help.

ExpatExchange Tbilisi forum, anonymous respondent — notes that many local people simply don't speak English, which makes daily errands in Georgia harder than expected even once you've settled in.

Conclusion

Here's the uncomfortable truth both countries would rather you didn't connect: a language barrier isn't really about the language. It's a stress test for how a place treats people who are temporarily, unavoidably, stupid in public. Georgia fails you linguistically and catches you culturally. Germany hands you a flattering proficiency statistic and then lets a Bürgeramt clerk dismantle your dignity over a missing Schufa document you didn't know existed. Learn Georgian for the romance of it. Learn German because the state will eventually require it of you, in writing, in a font that somehow makes "Aufenthaltstitelverlängerungsantrag" look like a threat. Neither country will meet you halfway. At least Georgia will feed you while you fail.