• Ibaudia@lemmy.worldEnglish
      32·
      5 months ago

      One time when my mom visited France, she asked a shop’s clerk for directions. She tried French but kind of gave up and used some English words scattered throughout her sentence for words she didn’t know. The clerk acted annoyed and pretended not to understand, so my mom tried to use only her broken French. The clerk responded very quickly in French.

      My mom then said, in English, “I’m sorry, I didn’t get that, French is such a beautiful language but I’m having a hard time learning it”. The clerk then completely 180’ed her attitude, acted all happy and switched to perfect, fluent English, with almost no French accent.

      That situation taught me that some French people apparently just want you to suck the metaphorical dick of their culture before they choose to be nice to you lol.

      • UnrepententProcrastinator@lemmy.ca
        5·
        5 months ago

        Nobody likes the fact that English tourists think they just can skip trying to learn a language when they visit another country. That being said, your mom was clearly trying so yeah I would have cut her some slack right away.

        • Jiggle_Physics@lemmy.world
          14·
          5 months ago

          If I had to learn the language of every country I ever visited I would have never had time to visit those countries.

          • UnrepententProcrastinator@lemmy.ca
            3·
            5 months ago

            Nobody’s asking you to be fluent but yeah every country I’ve been too I took crash course in the language they speak and used tools to try and speak the language. Expecting other people to learn English doesn’t help with how obnoxious english-speaking tourists have a reputation to be.

            • Jiggle_Physics@lemmy.world
              3·
              5 months ago

              This isn’t trying to learn a language. This is memorizing a few key words to convey the most basic of necessities. I have lived in english speaking tourist places, and anytime it got popular, with a more culturally insular ethnicity (ie like people from the booming Chinese middle class who aren’t working in a place that places value on knowing english), it’s not that big of a deal. This happened A LOT with the economic miracle period, new middle class, of germany, and japan. Their inability to speak english isn’t what bothered me, or anyone else where we were, it was their crass disrespect of property, propensity to wander off, alone, into the wilderness, etc. that made them bad tourists. Their home media trying to blame us for some idiot, that wandered off into death valley, with only a small bottle of water, didn’t help. I can’t expect someone raised in those conditions to know my language at all, and I wouldn’t want them excluded, nor feel they should receive rude treatment, for not know how to say bathroom, or whatever.

              However, if I spoke, say, simplified chinese, I would not continue speaking english to a chinese person I know I can’t speak english, to have a clear communication venue, in their language. As long as they are not acting in a manner detrimental to where I live, they are fine. Who am I to expect everyone to know my language? Why would I exclude those people to greater exposure to my culture if that bothered me? That would be oppositional to my desire for them to better understand my language. Just sounds like misplaced frustrations that come with living in any tourist spot. Depending on exactly what you feel/do, maybe xenophobia.

              I have been working on learning spanish for a couple years, in my free time. That is a language that is rapidly rising in importance in my country. That is why people actually try to learn languages.

        • MisterFrog@lemmy.world
          9·
          5 months ago

          You can definitely skip learning the local language these days if you’re just a short-term tourist. Translate anything written with OCR, and for most other things just smile, point, fingers for numbers, and again machine translation is totally fine for simple things.

          If you actually assume people can speak English though, that’s not cool.

          • Fushuan [he/him]@lemm.eeEnglish
            2·
            5 months ago

            Yup, if someone comes to me in the street asking if I know English, I’ll do my best effort to help them, no problem. If they come speaking in English asking the question? Fuck off, you are not entitled to get help.

    • Miaou@jlai.lu
      11·
      5 months ago

      All those people online with their anecdotes agreeing with what you wrote, yet my experience has been the complete opposite. I think the problem is Americans being insufferable assholes, and the French not letting that fly as much as other countries.

    • RecluseRamble@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      10·
      5 months ago

      Depends. They also like to watch you to awkwardly stammer through your hardly recognizable French sentence just to reply in perfect English (or even your mother tongue in border regions).

      • Droggelbecher@lemmy.world
        12·
        5 months ago

        My favourite is when they ignore you when you speak English (which isn’t even your native language either, just the most likely language to be understood by both parties), then when you speak bad French, they reply on even worse English. Bonus points for those that do it to tourists in France and as tourists in other counties (both have happened to me but ofc I can’t know if the same person would do both).

          • Droggelbecher@lemmy.world
            8·
            5 months ago

            Im sorry but did you reply to the wrong comment? Or am I missing the connection between the UK warning its citizens of a security risk for travelling to certain countries and some random French individuals having an entitled attitude?

    • Shapillon@lemmy.world
      5·
      5 months ago

      I’m French and foreign languages are one of my hobbies. I’m proficient in English and Spanish. I can at a lower level speak some Russian, German, Czech, and Italian.

      Imho the fault lies in our education system which puts a heavy accent on STEM studies and tends to treat anything outside of that as lesser subjects.

      Also from anecdotal evidence the younger generations are quite better than the older ones.

      • Randelung@lemmy.world
        1·
        5 months ago

        I stayed at an AirBnb let by a lovely couple a few years back. It’s mostly a meme with just a kernel of anecdotal truth.

    • SuddenDownpour@sh.itjust.works
      4·
      5 months ago

      Germany’s 2nd most spoken language is English, by 32% of the population.

      Germany’s 3rd most spoken language is French, by 9% of the population.

      France’s 2nd most spoken language is English, by 24% of the population.

      France’s 3rd most spoken language is Spanish, by 9% of the population.

      UK’s 2nd most spoken language is French, by 16% of the population.

      UK’s 3rd most spoken language is German, by 5% of the population.

      Source: https://languageknowledge.eu/

      While you could say that France is a bit behind the curve in comparison with most other Northern European countries, native English speakers are far worse at learning any other language. I’m not even French, but the circle-jerk English speaking communities have about French people sometimes gets pretty embarrassing.

      • EnderMB@lemmy.world
        8·
        5 months ago

        As someone from the UK, I absolutely do not think that 13% of the population can speak French to an acceptable level. I’d go as far as to say that 13% of the population can barely speak English to an understandable level…

      • Randelung@lemmy.world
        7·
        5 months ago

        The point is precisely that they are very capable and do speak the language, but they sometimes refuse to.

        And yes, it’s also a meme.

        • Hugh_Jeggs@lemm.ee
          2·
          5 months ago

          The simplest fact is, it’s xenophobia, not racism

          Edit - I don’t mean the comment is xenophobic, I mean it’s not racism if it’s about nationality

  • Dwayne_Elizondo_Mountain_Dew_Camacho@sh.itjust.works
    27·
    5 months ago

    I’m French Canadian. A friend of mine lives in Paris. I go to Paris fairly often. When I’m there, I speak exclusively English to anyone I don’t know.

    If I speak French, my god damn native tongue, they either make sure to tell me my accent is horrendous or they reply in German. In either case, they take this condescending tone… You know the one.

    When I speak English, not only do I have the upper hand on the language, but they don’t know I can understand them perfectly. Win win for me.

    Vous êtes chiants, les Parisiens.

    • Daerun@lemmy.world
      3·
      5 months ago

      In France they are known for this thing with their language where anything that doesn’t sound like parisine french they call it “patois” (I think I wrote it correctly?). You probably won’t have this problem if you go to the south of France.

    • ikidd@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      5 months ago

      The funny part is that quebecois split off of Classical French, and the bastardized version they speak in France now is farther away from classical than quebecois.

    • sneakyweasel@lemmy.world
      10·
      5 months ago

      Ive had to drive through quebec so many times. My french isn’t the best but i will try and communicate with someone for either food or directions. It blows my mind at how some people can just tell you are english and then they stop talking to you or they get this disgusting look on their face.

      • Yerbouti@sh.itjust.works
        7·
        5 months ago

        Lol. That’s really hard to believe. The main complain I’ve heard was that people will actually switch to english when they can tell you speak english, making it impossible to practice. But hey, we live in the world’s most friendly country, where everyone is welcome (except those disgusting natives and french canadian, /s).

      • AstralPath@lemmy.ca
        4·
        5 months ago

        I live very close to the Quebec border and I’ve never once in my life experienced this. My French isn’t all that great and not once did a Québécois give me a hard time. If anything they were super patient and were happy to see an Ontarian do their best to speak the language.

  • suction@lemmy.world
    19·
    5 months ago

    I once turned down a really good job offer because it would have meant having to listen to French people try to speak English.

  • menas@lemmy.wtf
    7·
    5 months ago

    Fun fact : if you write french with the last grammar modernization, and with the gender minority inclusivity, you could being correct AND pissed off a lot of french speaker.