Asklemmy

In Sweden you can get by with just English, no problem. A lot of people also speak Arabic or Finnish, but unlike English it is not taught to everyone in school so you can’t expect everyone to know it, or get by without learning Swedish or English.

Kurdish.
You would make very few, extremely close friends.

Here in Ireland, you'd be hard pressed to find somebody who doesn't speak English. Everybody born here speaks it fluently, and immigrants tend to speak enough to get by. Yes, if you speak the official second language you will have no problems.

Now if you speak Irish, our first official language? That's where you run into trouble. Irish is only used as a daily language in a few small areas. Since gaining independence, every government has supported efforts to revivify the language, and all have failed. Decreasingly many people speak it daily, and while many people know a few words, not many can hold s conversation in it. In fact, you'd probably have a better time speaking Polish.

(I gather this situation is similar to that in Aotearoa).

I live in Canada, where official languages are English and (Québécois) French, so yes, you could make many friends. I think about 1/5 of Canada is effectively bilingual, but there are also a lot of people who speak French only.

You're incorrect about Brazil. Spanish and English are actually behind languages like German, Italian and Japanese. There's also a mix of indigenous languages that summed up reach approximately the same number of speakers as Spanish.

Back in the 90s you could still find some smaller towns in Brazil where the majority of people didn't use Portuguese at all on their day to day. Nowadays you can still find people who only have Portuguese as their second language but pretty much everyone under 80 certainly speaks it.

France: If English is the second most common language, then as soon as you leave Paris or a really touristy spot, you’re fucked.

Not sure how likely you are to find someone in the wild speaking it, but on the Internet, a lot of people.

Living in Ottawa, Canada and frequently visiting Montréal 😬. Ottawa is majority English, especially in the west end but it's like a 30/70 split for French and English downtown and gets more and more French as you go east. By the eastern suburbs you're hearing French most of the time

Canada as a whole is majority English but Québec is obviously primarily French. New Brunswick is significantly French as well and there are other pockets of other French areas scattered across the country

I've spent entire workdays only speaking Spanish here in Chicago.

The official second language in the Netherlands is Frisian. I guess you can make friends in the province Friesland with it, but not a lot of other places.

English, on the other hand, is spoken almost everywhere.

USA: Spanish, you'll probably find some people.

Norway: Very common that English is a second language. Throughout daily life, Norwegian is spoken, but you should have no problem speaking English and making some friends in Norway.

My friend’s grandmother never really learned Castilian; she only spoke Catalan. I think she could understand it well enough to watch TV and get the gist of it. We tried to get her to speak it once; she didn’t get very far. I don’t know if she was literate, come to think of it.

But this was thirty of more years ago. Nowadays I suspect you’d be hard pressed to find a native Spaniard who can’t speak Castilian fluently.

argentina doesn't have a second official language but guarani is the closest i guess, specially since it is highly spoken in paraguay. i've met some people who speak it and in some provinces it's common to use guarañol which mixes both (usually when you're insulting someone you switch to guarani lol). so yeah it really depends mostly because depending on the province there is either one or other aboriginal language which is more spoken.

Denmark: virtually everyone speaks English, and it would be/is no problem to just speak English here

Here in South Limburg it's a mix of Limburgish/Dutch>German>English and French. Within a 20 minutes drive from my house, I can be in Germany, Flemish or French speaking Belgium, mostly anyone will understand German, Dutch or English near the border, French is a little harder, at least for me.

I am from Amsterdam, my friends all speak Limburgish dialect with eachother and I understand it, but I don't speak dialect, and they will adapt to normal Dutch.