The reason why Parisians are so rude in this context, as I've heard from several French natives, is that time is money. Most interactions with tourists in Paris are transactional. If a shopkeeper or restaurant server can spend two minutes with one customer in not-perfect French, or 30 seconds in not-perfect English, and there is no recreational value for the Parisian to the slower choice, then the Parisian will renegotiate the discussion's language to the faster choice.

You could call that helpful if you're optimizing for fastest transaction. For tourists who might have spent years in school learning the French language, and many recent weeks on Duolingo refreshing before the trip, and who are optimizing for a richer local experience, it's thoughtless and rude. Both viewpoints are rational.

It's not what they said that was rude. It's the way they said it.

Also I doubt that French is objectively harder to understand when spoken poorly than most languages. Especially when you consider tonal languages like Vietnamese and Mandarin.

Harder, I don't know. Hard, yes.

Difficulty in understanding non native speakers is largely subjective. It depends heavily on the perception of the listener.

Basically if the listener believes that it is difficult, it will be. Additionally, the harder the listener tries to engage with and understand the non-native speaker, the easier it becomes.

French could be unique among languages, but my strong suspicion is that if what you describe is true for most French speakers, it's mostly due to a widespread cultural perception that non-native French speakers are hard to understand rather than objective difficulty.

There is a professor at Georgia State University who's primary research focus is on this topic if you're interested in reading more.

http://www2.gsu.edu/~eslsal/cv.htm

> There is a professor at Georgia State University who's primary research focus is on this topic if you're interested in reading more. http://www2.gsu.edu/~eslsal/cv.htm

Interesting and intriguing! Thanks!

Eye-rolling and interrupting are always rude.

Untrue: the last time I was in Portugal, I had a couple of marvelous conversations in my lousy French with older Portuguese shopkeeps (whose French was probably similarly lousy -it is more common among older people to speak French than English, as many of their generation emigrated to France for work). I'm pretty sure the French dislike how accented, goofy foreigners sound when mispronouncing their language. I always found it a relief when they switched to much better English, as French is pretty hard.

I now have some lousy Portuguese, so we'll see if the Portuguese people are more gregarious with their language or if they ask me to fall back to French.