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.
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.
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.
The French do the same with all other languages, so fair game.
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.
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.
Yup, much more likely
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).
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).
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.
Exactly how heavy is the accent? And are we talking parisian or quebecois?
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.
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.
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...
I once turned down a really good job offer because it would have meant having to listen to French people try to speak English.
Were you being paid to watch that episode of The IT Crowd where they call French tech support?
I need to find out all about that, didn't watch much of the IT crowd
Baguette 👎
Long bread 👍
It is "Sfilatino" in Italian
What's San Francisco Latinos got anything to do with long bread?
Don't reinvent the freedom fries again.
Oh, an Anglo Canadian living in Quebec I see
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.
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).
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.
Let's be honest, who actually speaks French outside of Canada and France?
The cajuns and acadians in the USA beside the obvious that have already been named.
Just like Werner Herzog
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pY-0JfEdLY
You could only get some French out of me with a gun pointed at my head... It actually happened to me...
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.
"you could be correct and piss off a lot of French speakers". Just fuck off, frog.
Are you from Montreal West Island?
Ah the good old english loyalists hiding on their mountain hoping the dirty french peasants won't touch them.
Incredibly based!
