Re:It’s Hard to Learn French in Middle Age
by bsder on Tuesday April 30, 2019 @06:35PM
(#19792686)
> It's only two anecdotes. I may have simply run into rude people. But, they made me not care to ever speak French.
Oddly, my experience has been the opposite. Most of the places I have gone to in Paris spoke very little to no English but were trying to be very helpful anyway and I HAD to use my broken French.
However, I could tell that we didn't really hit the "standard" tourist shops (stayed just off École Militaire).
I will say that most English speakers tend to be VERY tolerant of mistakes. I think it's a combination of:
1) There is no single "native" English.
Think about how different people from different socioeconomic classes in the US, Canada, UK, India, etc. sound. And they are all native English speakers!
2) English is really agglomerative and absorbs neologisms readily.
Think about how quickly typhoon and tycoon entered the language, for example. Can you picture that kind of evolution for any other language?
Oddly, my experience has been the opposite. Most of the places I have gone to in Paris spoke very little to no English but were trying to be very helpful anyway and I HAD to use my broken French.
However, I could tell that we didn't really hit the "standard" tourist shops (stayed just off École Militaire).
I will say that most English speakers tend to be VERY tolerant of mistakes. I think it's a combination of:
1) There is no single "native" English.
Think about how different people from different socioeconomic classes in the US, Canada, UK, India, etc. sound. And they are all native English speakers!
2) English is really agglomerative and absorbs neologisms readily.
Think about how quickly typhoon and tycoon entered the language, for example. Can you picture that kind of evolution for any other language?