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One written language, a great many spoken ones
Germany is dialectally diverse to a degree that surprises people who arrive with a course book, and the diversity is old: what is now one written language was standardised across territories whose spoken varieties had already diverged for centuries. Two speakers in full local dialect, one from Bavaria and one from Schleswig-Holstein, may genuinely fail to understand each other. This is not a curiosity at the edges; it is the normal situation, managed by everyone switching to something more standard when they need to. The north-south difference is not only linguistic but attitudinal, and it is the part worth knowing socially. In Bavaria, Baden-Württemberg and Austria, dialect carries warmth and belonging: it is spoken by doctors and mayors, appears in advertising, and using only standard German can mark you as an outsider or as cold. Through much of the north and east, dialect was treated through the twentieth century as a sign of rural backwardness, was discouraged in schools, and has substantially receded — which is why northern German sounds closer to the textbook. Low German, Plattdeutsch, survives in the far north with official recognition as a regional language rather than a dialect, and there are active efforts to keep it alive. For a learner the practical consequences are three. First, choose your listening material deliberately at this stage: national broadcasting, dubbed film and northern speakers are much closer to what you have learned than a conversation in a Munich beer garden. Second, recognize the difference between not knowing enough German and hearing a different variety of it — the second is not a deficiency and is not solved by studying. Third, ask. The request to switch to Hochdeutsch is understood everywhere and is granted without offense, because every dialect speaker is bilingual in this sense and does it several times a day. One thing not to do: adopt dialect words as a learner. Recognizing Semmel is useful; ordering one in Hamburg is not, and sprinkling Servus into otherwise standard German can read as costume rather than fluency. The safe adoptions are the greetings, which are regional but not dialectal, and even there the rule is simple — answer the greeting you were given. If somebody says Grüß Gott, say Grüß Gott back. If they say Moin, say Moin. A final note on the bread roll, which is a real linguistic landmark rather than a joke. Mapping the words for everyday objects across the German-speaking area is an active field, and crowd-sourced dialect atlases now document dozens of regional terms for a roll alone, along with the boundaries between them. Those boundaries mostly follow old territorial lines, which is why the word for breakfast changes at a border nobody has been able to see for two hundred years.