Do english speaking people understand the german parts?
I live in Switzerland, and while we do have our own dialect, we basically understand and speak german perfectly. So one day, I decided to watch this movie in its original version in english (we have german dubs here) - and I was surprised to see that there is still a lot of german in this movie. Not only do the german soldiers (well, most of them) talk in their language, we have an entire scene of Hosenfeld and Szpilman talking to each other in german - even without subtitles! (at least in the version I watched)
I naturally understood that perfectly, but it left me wondering how well foreign people are able to understand this. Is it the norm that german is being taught in schools? If not, how well can american/english people follow this?