As a French person surrounded by non native speakers, I am sad to hear this. Many French people should quit their elitism with respect to the language and start bothering about the content instead. Languages are tools, not an end in themselves (they are also a very interesting topic).
It is still useful for non native speaker to be corrected and they usually appreciate it (foreigners has told me many times that French people don't correct them enough and they were happy I did). They usually want to improve! There are ways to do it without disrupting the conversation:
- come back to a mistake at a later point after the conversation is over - a correction should not interrupt the conversation taking place, except maybe for critical mistakes or to fix an ambiguity (and then it's often better to ask than to blindly correct, because it feels better for everybody and sometimes you are just wrong). It's already hard to speak in another language, it should be clear to everyone that making mistakes is not important. It's better to let people express themselves intuitively, smoothly, with mistakes, than a conversation where they have to think hard about the grammar and the language and where it is difficult to express themeself.
- pick frequent mistakes
- mistakes are a great opportunity to have interesting discussions about both the native language(s) of the speaker and the language being spoken. I've been learning many things thanks to this kind of discussions and they probably make me better in English.
- keep in mind that you are probably an absolute shit in the native language of the person compared to their level in yours, and they are actually doing very well.
There is nothing fundamentally wrong with making language mistakes, don't be a dick about them.
I suspect most people agree with this, and I don’t personally encounter a lot who or elitist or dicks about it. What is most common, in my experience is a complete lack of effort to (a) interpret what a incorrect phrase might have meant and (b) avoid idiomatic yet superfluous choice of words. These are a lot obvious yet contribute significantly to the inclusivity of a conversation with non native speakers. This, surprising, given how welcoming France is of foreigners otherwise.
Sadly I gave up studying French and focused on Russian and German. I have experience in all countries and after being in France I was so disheartened I gave up. My uni grades for French reflect this :(
The joy of a Russian who hears you at least try to speak Russian vs. the French baker who barks at you in response in English
Not the first time I hear this. Unfortunately there are still many places where people don't speak English or are plain hostile to English. It's probably improving as more and more people are far more exposed to English with TV shows and things like that than before.
Not all places are equal. For now, you are probably better off targeting a city where it is usual to have a lot of strangers, because there is a big university welcoming many foreign students for instance.
Being personally interested in equality, acceptance etc. etc. I find it sad to see more sophisticated language use dying off being replaced by a version optimized for ease of understanding by everyone.
I work in a research group with a lot of international people across Europe and elsewhere. As an American there for years, I got used to doing what they say here, speaking at the lowest common denominator, but when a new native English speaker (could be British or Australian too) enters, the same effect takes place.
Similar can be said of French (since my group is in France), all these non native speakers (myself included) exchange freely in terrible French but it all dries up with the first French person because largely they are mostly intolerant of poorly spoken French.
Still I think the skill of not judging and talking up and down the proficiency level according to the people you’re with can be learned fairly easily, if you get away from the idea that language proficiency reflects competence (in your domain of interest)