Making Friends in Germany

Making friends in Germany is genuinely hard, and it is not just you. In InterNations' 2025 Expat Insider survey, 63% of foreigners living in Germany said they struggle to make local friends, against 42% worldwide. The reason is less that Germans are unfriendly than that friendship there runs on a different clock and through different places. Once you know where it happens, it gets much easier.

The numbers behind the feeling

If the first year in Germany felt lonely, you are in a large and well-measured club, and the locals are not doing much better.

The last two rows belong together. Young Germans are lonely too, and the country is also full of places built for meeting people. The gap between those two facts is where newcomers get stuck.

Bekannte and Freunde are different words

German keeps a firm line between a Bekannter, an acquaintance, and a Freund, a friend. English blurs the two, so a colleague you have had lunch with twice might be "a friend" in London. In Berlin he is a Bekannter for a good while yet, and calling him a Freund too early sounds odd rather than warm.

Intercultural trainers often describe this with the peach and coconut model, usually credited to the psychologist Kurt Lewin. Peach cultures, like the US, are soft and friendly on the outside with a hard stone of privacy deeper in. Coconut cultures, like Germany, are hard to crack at first, but once you are through the shell, you are in. That explains both halves of the expat experience: the cool first months, and the friendships that turn out to be unusually loyal once they form.

The move from Sie to du is a small version of the same thing. In many settings, switching to the informal "you" is an offer, often made by the older or more senior person, and accepting it is a real step closer.

Friendship there is built by repetition

The University of Kansas researcher Jeffrey Hall estimated in 2018 that it takes roughly 50 hours together to go from acquaintance to casual friend, around 90 hours to become a real friend, and more than 200 hours for a close friend. You do not get 90 hours with anyone from a single great evening at a bar. You get them from seeing the same people every week.

That is exactly what the German Verein provides. With more than 615,000 registered clubs, there is one for almost anything: football, choir, rowing, chess, hiking, allotment gardens, the volunteer fire brigade. Membership is cheap, the same people come every week, and the activity carries the conversation until the friendship can carry itself. Ask Germans where they met their closest friends and the answer is often a club, a school class or a university course, all places where those hours added up without anyone planning them.

The digital on-ramp

Before the weekly club, there is usually a phone. In Germany a great deal of local life is organised in WhatsApp groups: the five-a-side game on Thursdays, the flat-share hunt in a new city, the parents of one class, the choir's rehearsal changes. Finding the right group is often the first step to finding the people in it.

Public WhatsApp directories help here. Groupler.app is a free German-language directory of public WhatsApp groups, sorted by topic and including a category for cities, and it lets newcomers browse and join without creating an account. Its WhatsApp directories by category cover everything from sport and gaming to flat-shares and job hunting.

Online connection is thinner than the club it leads to, but thinner is not nothing. For someone in their first month in Munich, a discoverable WhatsApp group for new arrivals does the job the old Stammtisch, the regular table at the local pub, used to do: it gives you a time, a place and a reason to show up.

Language is the other on-ramp. If your German is holding you back, practising with real native speakers beats another app streak. On LemonChat, Germans make up about 9% of everyone matched between 12:00 and 16:00 UTC, almost twice their share in the small hours, so a lunchtime session is the best chance of a quick conversation with someone in Germany.

A plan for the first six months

1. Month one: say yes to everything. Colleague lunches, neighbour's invitations, the welcome event at your course. You are collecting Bekannte, and that is the right goal for now.
2. Month two: join one Verein. Pick something you would do anyway and that meets weekly. Go every week, even when you do not feel like it, because the hours only count if they repeat.
3. Month three: get into the groups. Join the WhatsApp group of your club, your building or your city's newcomers, and answer when someone asks who is coming.
4. Month four: be the one who invites. Suggest a drink after training or a walk on Sunday. Germans often wait for a clear, concrete plan rather than a vague "we should hang out sometime".
5. Months five and six: be reliable. Turn up when you said you would, on time. In a coconut culture, consistency is what gets you through the shell.

Give it a year, not a month

The first months in Germany are often the loneliest, and the numbers say that is normal rather than a verdict on you. Friendship there is slow to start and slow to end. Put in the weekly hours through a club, use WhatsApp groups to find your way in, practise the language with real people, and by the end of the first year the Bekannte start turning into Freunde.