A lot of very different words sound similar. A very simple grammatical mistake can completely change the meaning of a sentence.
And yeah, it's probably kind of the same in English, but French is not the linga franca English is today (see what I did there!). While we get a ton of daily practice reading/hearing broken English, it is not the same with French for people living in France.
People weren't correcting you to mock you. They wanted to understand and probably help you.
Additionally they most likely already knew English and were able to decipher "French broken by an English speaker".
Edit: and since we're sharing anecdotes. I got the same "rude" treatment from Russians when I was learning Russian in Russia, or from Swedish folks when learning Swedish in Stockholm. It's just hard for native speakers to deal with broken linguo, that's just how it is. Swedish people would even reply to me in English, some would call it rude, they were just trying to be helpful and efficient.
This isn't just about non-native speakers but also applies to native French speakers from regions like Quebec or Congo. Despite using similar vocabulary, they sometimes face challenges being understood in France, mainly due to their distinct accents, I mean I believe this also occurs between various region of France
Yes this was covered in my original message. Miss pronouncing a word in French can make it extremely hard to understand for a native speaker. And yes people from Quebec are an excellent example. They will often struggle when their accent is too strong when visiting France. And people are not ill meaning, Quebecois are very popular in France, it's just genuinely hard.
People often don't know that the French language was literally a political weapon to create France. France is political construct, not cultural like most countries. It is an aggregation of different cultures, including different languages. It was vital for France to succeed as a construct to force the idea of "correct French". A French language that would be the same everywhere, without local variations. So yeah, the French ear is not used to dealing with mistakes or strong accents.
No, they did not speak English.
If they had, I wouldn't have subjected them to my French.
~320M French speakers globally (220M native, official language for 29 countries)
~559M Spanish speakers (~480M native, 20 countries)
~1.1B Mandarin speakers globally (a few countries, mother tongue in ~20 countries)
~1.5B English speakers globally (~400M native, official language for 67 countries)
So for much of the world it seems pretty clearly English (& has been since WWII) and French is in the “second” tier competing with Spanish and Mandarin (probably just behind Spanish & Mandarin in terms of penetration lingua franca is about being the bridge language).
> Based mostly on Northern Italy's languages (mainly Venetian and Genoese) and secondarily on Occitano-Romance languages (Catalan and Occitan) in the western Mediterranean area at first, Lingua Franca later came to have more Spanish and Portuguese elements, especially on the Barbary Coast (now referred to as the Maghreb). Lingua Franca also borrowed from Berber, Turkish, French, Greek and Arabic.
Technically no. Especially not the northern dialects which modern French is based on. Arabs/North Africans/etc. just called all Western European Franks. The actual dialect/pigeon language used in the Mediterranean and called "Lingua Franca" was mainly based on Northern Italian, Occitan and Catalan (so barely related to modern French).
Which was a language that was barely related to modern French (besides belonging to the same Romance language sub-branch which includes Catalan, Occitan and most Northern Italian dialects, coincidentally places where most of those merchants who introduced that language came from).
So, very closely related to French?
No. In France they openly showed their disgust at my French and refused even to speak to me.
Was this one situation or multiple? What was the context?
Anyway, sorry you had this experience.
No. It’s most probably in your head and is inconsistent with everything I have seen or heard. Or you were unintentionally rude, maybe. There are pricks everywhere so I don’t doubt that someone was like that, but I seriously doubt that the people in general were.
The medieval English and the modern English are completely different. Medieval French and modern French, not so much.
There are roughly three named "ages" of English (in England): old, middle and modern. I can just about understand written middle English and have severe problems with old English.
Modern English can be very flexible, which is probably why it has become popular as a lingua franca. There are no real noun genders. Word order can be fiddled with mercilessly too. Officially, English sentences are subject - verb - object (SVO) for example: "I sat on the bed". You can say "I the bed sat on" or "On the bed sat I" or "sat I on the bed" and it still works fine. Most of those variants are regionally correct, somewhere.
English spelling is an absolute nightmare! Linking pronunciation to spelling is absolutely awful. I can completely understand English as a second language speakers throwing their hands up in the air and declaring the whole thing as complete bollocks! However, that means that we are extraordinarily tolerent of speling mistaks. field or feild? sealed or ceiled? Who nose!
You have the causality backwards here.
> Word order can be fiddled with mercilessly too. Officially, English sentences are subject - verb - object (SVO) for example: "I sat on the bed". You can say "I the bed sat on" or "On the bed sat I" or "sat I on the bed" and it still works fine.
This is just incorrect.
There was more than that. For a while, England was a backwater of the Angevin empire and kings of England were native French speakers for quite a long time.
* i say ultra because proper german has more cases than french in fact.
The classification as Romance vs. Germanic is based on two important observations:
I. Even considering the Germanic influence, French and its close relatives are still more similar to each other and to the other Romance languages. If I see a page of French text, my knowledge of German is almost useless, but my Italian gets me very far. This classification can be made objectively by using Swadesh lists[0] or related tools.
II. We can trace its historical development very well and it seems to organically emerge from the vulgar Latin of late antiquity.
Of course the association with Latin was deliberate, but this happened much earlier when the Romans conquered, colonized, and eventually romanized Gaul. Because of this, there was simply never a need for loaning words from Latin on a large scale. Later, the Franks were just a new management that placed itself on top of the existing culture.
on french being vulgar latin, i agree. but bear in mind that the vulgar latin spoken in the provinces are akin to creole (and other patois/pidgin dialects) of modern mainstream languages: they’re amalgamations of many languages, the mainstream languages furnishing words and phrases where necessary. barely do they supply grammar. that said french, unlike other romance languages, demonstrates a strong germanic syntax structure, which has persisted over centuries of iterations of the language. the overwhelming evidence suggests that french is germanic (both in syntax structure and vocabulary). it’s incorrect to assume that spanish and italian, for example, are pro-drop when in latin the so-called pro-drop is the default. intelligisne? is what you ask your interlocutor, not tu intelligsne? in french an explicit subject is required, without which the sentence is nonsensical and grammatically incorrect.
french is arguably romance but it is germanic too, and in no small way.
Nobody is denying that French has Germanic influence. And it probably encouraged its highly divergent evolution from its relatives. The neighboring Picard language is a lot more conservative for example.
Please compare the following paragraph to its translation into German, Norwegian, and Italian. That should really settle the discussion. From the Wikipedia article about Christmas. My estimation is that like 95% of these words are of Romance origin:
> Noël est la fête chrétienne qui célèbre la Nativité, c'est-à-dire la célébration qui rappelle la naissance de Jésus-Christ. La fête de Noël vient peu de temps après le solstice d'hiver boréal auquel elle est associée (voir ci-bas). La déchristianisation faisant, la fête de Noël est aujourd'hui coupée de son fondement religieux dans de nombreux pays occidentaux, mais elle y subsiste comme fête traditionnelle.
Edit: Vocabulary matters though because certain words are more likely to be replaced by loan words than others. More importantly, they allow linking with a language's close relatives (most importantly the other languages d'oïl), which might be more conservative, and with its historical forms across time. Said differently: languages without apparent similarity to other languages, no close existing relatives, and no written records to trace their development are isolates by definition.
They frivolously expend with the consonants at the ends of words. All that additional signal just thrown away! /s
The main criticism I've heard is kind of the opposite - that they dislike foreigners not trying to speak French, and just starting communication in English. If both of these are true then I guess that puts foreigners in a tough place where they're damned if they try and damned if they don't?
So yeah, they'd rather ignore a lost child than tolerate foreigners not knowing their "beautiful" language.
It's not about Parisians ignoring foreigners because they don't speak the language, it's about Parisians ignoring people.
We're nice to each other. The local social codes are perhaps not as obvious to visitors, but if you put some effort into befriending the city, Paris can be very kind.
Agree with the whole "Parisians ignoring people" thing though. If you're running late for an appointment and you see hundreds of thousands of people per day, you don't really differentiate between a lost tourist and yet another bum asking for spare change to buy beer and drugs with.
I can think of a few examples: Jakarta, Ho Chi Minh, and Bangkok, where I found people quite friendly, and London, where people are close to but not quite as unfriendly as Paris. But that's the extent of my experience.
But the experience does not compare to traveling with my partner who speaks fluent zero-accent French. Paris turns into a different much nicer city when you pair with a native speaker.
That said, you’ll never get the level of service you see in USA. The French (Europe in general) just don’t care that much about customer UX. You either do it their way or you can leave.
I think Europe partly just has different preferences around service. We tend to find American servers annoyingly fake, and to be constantly needlessly interrupting us to ask if we need anything. And of course, one should also take into account the experience of being a server.
a small correction here: ANNOYINGLY FAKE
- you don’t have to be particularly careful about pickpockets anywhere in Europe, at least not more than anywhere else in the world.
- you always get free tapwater in restaurants if you ask for it anywhere in Europe, also most waiters are also generally pleasant (of course there can be unpleasant people anywhere)
- not sure about the tax thing (why would you care about that as visitor anyway?) - atleast we have free healthcare and free university shrug
- haven’t heard from anyone that got arrested for a „rude“ tweet lolwhat
You don’t have to visit of course but it would surely expand your horizon. When I visited the US for the first time I realised that most of the prejudices against Americans weren’t true (that most Americans are fat, stupid and greedy for example - sure a lot of them are but not the majority)
That was one thing I could never wrap my head around.
The other thing was the extreme use of AC. I can understand AC to an extent, but they were making it so cold I had to bring extra clothes just to go in the supermarket for example - what the heck?!
In the Netherlands you'd have a hard time. Most places will refuse, especially if that's the only thing you're ordering.
There are a lot of pickpockets in Paris, I've never been victim of it but I've witnessed it several time. Never saw that in the 5 years I lived in Tokyo or the 3 years I lived in SF.
You always get free tapwater in France (that's the law) but not in Poland.
I agree in that I would recommend anyone to visit Europe - even European should visit other European countries! But it's important to remember that Europe is made of several very, very different countries.
I would still argue all I wrote above applies generally to all countries in the EU. Could not reproduce your tapwater experience in Poland so ymmv
Yes, in America as long as you stay in the right parts of town, and don't venture off the house at the wrong time, you wont get mugged or (10x as likely as in Europe) shot, including getting shot by the police (also 10x as likely as in Europe).
>We have free water at restaurants, and the staff won't treat you like a mooch for asking about it; in fact most staff of any business will make at least a basic attempt to be pleasant towards you. You get your money's worth in food portions at restaurants, the taxes are cheaper, you won't be arrested and fined for making a rude tweet.. why exactly would I want to visit Europe?
No reason, please stay where you are.
Enjoy tons of crazies in the streets, any idiot being able to get a gun and even carry it around in public, a huge drug "epidemic" (off and on counter), crampling public infrastructure (and laughable public transport), suburban nightmarish landscapes, areas of such dire poverty that look more like the third world than a western country, a widespread ignorance and lack of education, an abusive police force that treats citizens like medieval peasants (and throws them to jail with 10x the ratio compared to a western europe country), the healthcare sector and insurance companies taking people for suckers, a cutlture based around mindelss consumption, and other such niceties.
And of course people that can seriously ask "why would I want to visit Europe" based on internet paranoia they've read about pickpockets everywhere (meaning: when they get dead center into the most densely packed tourist traps), the inavailability of free water in restaurants, and "small" portion sizes (because, obese people need to eat their preferred portions too).
We have some real problems with policing here, but as a foreign tourist you’re more likely to die in a plane crash getting here than to be shot by the police.
[1] https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2003/21/section/127
This makes it even worse... Since those armed people can also shoot you.
In constrast the German police kills about 10 people a year, which given the population would amount to the US police killing 45 people total (so 5% that of the US). France, the worst example, the analogy would amount to about 250 per year (so 25% that of the US).
For homicides, Germany had 260 in 2026. That would amount to 1135 projected to the US population difference. France (again a worst case) has 734 per year. In US terms that would be equal to the US having 3772 per year. Adjusted for population, the US has around 5x the number of France and 16x the number of homicides Germany has. Other western european countries are much lower.
In theory, but reality fewer than 10% of all homicides are committed by someone who is a stranger to the victim. Of those, about half are the result of an argument that escalates to violence. You're exceedingly unlikely to be the victim of any violence as a tourist in almost any part of the US that a European might visit.
Taxes are country specific, you‘ll find some EU countries with lower taxation than your average US state, eg Bulgaria.
Being rude on Twitter won’t land you in jail, please.
> why exactly would I want to visit Europe?
Business, sightseeing, and cheap dentistry.
Jail time was on the table in this instance I had in mind.
That is, what you're saying is even more ridiculous than an European refusing to go to the US for fear of getting shot in the streets.
Because I have to ask and unless I'm explicit they'll bring a 330 mL glass bottle which is extremely annoying. That forces me to drink beer all the time just to avoid that which is not exactly ideal.
> eg Bulgaria
The VAT there is 20% which is much higher than any place in the US.
My opinion of American tourists is such that I can't tell if this is a joke, and I'm Canadian, ffs.
Drinking beer so you don’t need to drink water from a bottle - well ok, you do you.
To see stuff? US doesen't really have that have much besides nature worth seeing/experiencing from a traditional tourist perspective. Almost all the cities besides a handful are extremely boring in comparison (and in those worth visiting like SF you're very likely to get stabbed by a drug addict or even shot)*.
To be honest besides not having free water in restaurants (if I have to ask it's already not free (emotionally)) none of those other things you've mentioned seem like a big deal for me.
> vigilant for pickpockets
In some places? Sure. But IMHO even in notorious cities like Barcelona it's not really that bad.
* well that's certainly not true.. but if you base your opinion on what some Europeans might be saying on Reddit/etc. you might end up believing stuff like this.
The necessity for tips is visible from a mile away.
That’s okay, we don’t want you. I lived the first 28 years of my life in the downtown historic area of an increasingly touristy European capital and American tourists were always the worst :)
The Chinese tourists can be frustrating because they travel in tight packs and take up a lot of room, but at least they understand they’re not visiting an amusement park and are not the center of the world.
My favorite were always fellow European high school and college kids traveling in small groups. You’d never even realize they were tourists if not for the oversized backpacks. They just blend in, aren’t loud, respect the locals, and seek authentic experiences.
You don't see people shooting heroin literally 5 metres away from a tourist attraction in Paris (for the record - right next to the queue of tourists to get on the cable car at Powell/Market stop).
From personal experience, most large French cities (Toulouse, Lyon...) have higher QoL than Paris, for much lower prices. Would not be surprised if this is also true for London/rest of UK, perhaps other countries as well.
Had a friend say the same was similar for Amsterdam vs other cities (eg Eindhoven) in the Netherlands
Even in the US, it's probably easier to have a nice life on a reasonable budget in someplace like Denver or St Louis than in NYC or Washington DC. Capitals tend to expensive, crowded and loud.
I grew up in Houston. I've heard enough rich Texans bitching about Mexicans not speaking English to disagree with that statement.
I hate service in American restaurants. I don’t want to be babysit and have someone always behind me. I can fill my glass myself just fine, and I am able to call if I need something. I just want to be left alone to enjoy the meal and company without being watched. That said, Paris tends to be a caricature of a different kind, sure.
however the trick is simply to learn enough that you can politely ask if it's alright to use english with them
Learning is not being "illiterate". It means trying to become literate and shows intention. Being impolite in response to use of such non-perfect use of language is rude at least and that's what everyone says here.
... and my anectodital experience:
My wife was learning French for 4+ years, probably in not hightest quality high school in Poland - no good practice unfortunately, but good intentions.
Exhibit 1.
Husband of my sister in law when She tried to be polite and start friendly chat "her-broken-French". Response: don't talk to me, better switch to English ...
(this guy is authistic anyway, so let's drop this sample)
Exhibit 2 Month in France travelling by train. It was much more easier for me to find someone speaking English (my English wasn't good back then too), than for her to find someone to speak with her French. I mean typical dialogs: train station, tickets, tourist info or grocery.
She gave up after week and we switched to me managing dialogs with French people in English.
Yes, her French was probably not too good or even bad, but how for Christs sake was she supposed to improve it? I guess practice is agreed to be best way to do it?
That’s the case most often, and that’s what most of my friends who lived in Paris say. There’s a (not entirely justified) pervasive feeling that French people can’t speak English properly and they tend to be self-conscious about it.
> If both of these are true then I guess that puts foreigners in a tough place where they're damned if they try and damned if they don't?
It’s different people. Most of them are forgiving, if clumsy, and a few of them are pricks. Just like in any country. A fair few don’t care and you can live perfectly well near Paris for years speaking only a handful of French words.
However I don't think that it's common for French people to critized foreigner's French. On the contrary, they're very supportive of people trying to speak their language.
I'm sure you can find some people who would critize foreigners' bad French but probably not more than any other country.
I'm (an anglophone) from Quebec and worked in Europe for a while. Parisians totally mock people not speaking Parisian French. They're even open and extraordinarily condescending about it. The rest of the country is cool and generally helpful
They weren’t enamoured to France.
Source: my grade school kids' history texts
Quebec has a very good image in France.
He means that they look down upon Quebec people, as if they are "ploucs" [from some backwater colony], without their French "sophistication" and accent.
If you're hurt by parisian attitude, you've failed the "I shouldn't give a fuck" test they're making you pass ;)
https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20220829-the-royal-roots-...
There’s a similar effect in the maritime with English btw - there’s plenty of North American, Australian, New Zealand, Irish, Scottish etc accents that can be difficult to understand even though they are native speakers.
To me, taking offense that someone doesn’t understand your accent is similar to someone who makes fun of someone else for their accent. It says more about you than the other person.
First of all, french is not some beautiful language once you grok the grammar, rather pretty weird and old layered 'spaghetti code' with tons of exceptions to tons of obscure rules (nothing, absolutely nothing elegant there). Its needlessly complex especially when you know other languages solved it much better, and as with other bureaucratic stuff in France any attempt for reform failed. English to non-native (in both of those) is a beautiful magnificent blessing in comparison, you can be proficient with little, french will literally look puzzled at you and get really quickly fed up with you. Patience is really not a typical french virtue. But I guess if you like the feeling of struggling for whole life, looked down upon and gain motivation from it then its great.
Second, I don't know details of how schools work in France (seems a rather toxic place pushing way too hard for competitiveness but I may be wrong here), but I see result every day also in cca 50% of my colleagues - people are absolutely snobbish in the worst possible manner about their language to the point of being sometimes toxic, and automatically scowl at any tiny mistake. Guess what, as a foreigner trying to learn language you will make tons of them, even on C2 level. There is absolutely minimum help, they will just laugh at you like bunch of small kids, literally mocking you and pointing fingers at you. I mean 50+ years old higher managers bursting into laugh how stupid you are. Every single time. Schooling and overall mindset make french people behave like arrogant folks a lot (not so much say folks from African colonies, much much nicer folks to interact with; same for Swiss french and cca Belgians too. Don't know much about Quebec folks, but in casual conversation french mock and insult them behind their back pretty horribly). I've never ever been mocked by natives for making even basic mistakes in any other language, its just part of basic human decency.
I've seen recently shock and disgust among young French that some french local paragliding teacher exposed to decades of english-speaking tourists used some english words in his french. Those were some otherwise smart folks. I've had my very good American friend who is overweight literally gave up on french and France, on his month long trip there they were insulting and mocking him in the bars and restaurants, in hotels, in trains etc (I talk about staff, not other tourists). Man, I have hundreds of stories like this, unfortunately very consistent.
I know 5 languages, 3 of them very different compared to my native one, and French is by far the worst of them to learn and just use it (I know there are worse, just describing my experiences). French folks need to come in terms of not being superpower nor center of the world anymore and accepting there is more than their language in the world. I've visited every continent (apart from Antarctica) and generally travelled a lot and literally nowhere I felt so little welcomed and rather just tolerated due to money bringing in like in France. A truly beautiful place, history, cuisine, nature, but neither me, nor my wife (who studied in Lyon for quite some time) nor folks around us in similar situation certainly don't travel there for the local people, which is often the most important aspect of my traveling when going for exotics.
/sorry for long rant
Though I can’t disagree with the “ancient spaghetti code” characterisation, “needlessly complex” is linguistically meaningless. People continuously use language and infelicities are typically rapidly eliminated.
My wife and I would between us resort to French express things that couldn’t be conveniently expressed in our respective native languages. I think it’s pretty common — probably universal — to inject foreign loan words or phrases in multilingual families or other groups. In the case of resorting to French, it’s usually for a word that has a lot of implications, ambiguity or other ramifications, which can be expressed compactly in French. A consequence of the spaghetti code you decry.
Written Arabic is really great for this.
Can you please ask her some recommendations for contemporary music?
I find french rap wonderful!
My new favorite artist is Aye Nakamura ; before I really loved Eva Queen.
J'aimais and j'aimai (imparfait and passé simple) are both past but
the first expresses "I loved (duration, action being performed in the past)" and the latter "I loved (instant, action completed)".
Je finissais (imparfait) = I was completing (some stuff), je finis (passé simple) = I completed.
Also
Je marcherais (conditionnel présent) = I would walk, (possible)
Je marcherai (futur) = I will walk (true)
(Maybe the ability to express a nuance discreetly is a sort of elegance)
You could say " this is spaghetti code" but je marche, je marchai, je marchais, je marcherai, je marcherais respects some kind of nearly mathematical rules that allows me to feel situations.
March - e
March - ai
March - ais
Marcher - ai
Marcher - ais
J'ai marché, j'avais marché, j'eus marché, j'aurais marché, j'aurai marché express a lot of different things based on the different forms of "to have".
English has this kind of complexity too : I have walked, I had walked, I did walk, I will walk, I will have walked, I did have walked...
I am not arguing about the possibility of nuances here but rather about the means by which they are expressed, of course.
Absolutely not, really. French was easier to learn.
My experience living in Paris is that a lot of the older folks have very little practice or desire to practice speaking with broken French speakers.
Japan I found to be similar. Fuck up the pronunciation the slightest bit and you’re just stared at blankly.
"Come out with your hands up, or I'll sh*t!"
Is it that difficult? I can understand broken French just fine as a non native speaker. For French people it looks as if it's impossible, but I don't buy it.
>People weren't correcting you to mock you. They wanted to understand and probably help you.
Judging from how indifferent and unhelpful retail workers, waiters, and such were, even when you speak perfect French or even when speaking in English in case they understand it, I doubt that's the case.
Did you start your interaction with a "Bonjour" at least? "Customer is king" is not something in France, so you want to be polite with everyone.
I was like.... Dude... come the fuck on.
Is there any evidence that French has some unique qualities that render it unusually difficult to understand when not spoken by a someone fluent in the language? I’m reasonably competent in French and if there is such a feature, I don’t see it.
And some words to Paris. Yes people there are rude! But you have to understand that most People in France live there and WORK there. They give a fuck about tourism because there is so much other work there the town could skip on it. Thats why they are anoid by tourists. They go to work and some people ask them for things they dont care because they have to go to work. Paris is a dream in Summertime because so many people leave Paris because of summer vacations that it is totaly empty.
And yes American tourists are something special. You can see them 100meter away beeing confused why Paris is building houses in such an old fashioned way.
I would accept that France is slightly harder to pronounce than English but as a beginner/intermediate French speaker I don't personally believe it.
However, I definitely agree that people in France - especially Paris - are not receptive to foreigners speaking French at all. They don't support you, and you do feel looked down on for speaking badly (in comparison to Vietnam where you will never feel looked down on, you'll just receive looks of confusion). Again, I don't mean friends that you make. I mean the general French populace that you meet while going about your daily business, in shops, restaurants, and so on.
Spain, Italy, Greece are similar to France in that they are condescending towards non-native speakers. Mainland Greece was the worst for me. Meanwhile I would say that Portugal, Indonesia, Germany, and many English speaking countries (at least in cities) are quite helpful and friendly towards non-native speakers. Of course, I only have my own limited experience to go on so I may be wrong.
I've spent quite a lot of time in Spain and I've never felt that but it's possible that I just didn't notice. The same in Italy although I've only spent 3 or 4 weeks there in total. However it has never occurred to me to think of Paris as unfriendly either which seems to contradict the experience of most other people, so maybe I'm just oblivious to that sort of thing.
One thing I've found is that fleeting interactions in shops and restaurants are a terrible way of practicing a language. I can have a full conversation with a Spanish person without too much difficulty, but I still find shops and restaurants quite challenging situations. So, don't go on holiday to practice language X. Pay $15 for a one hour online conversation class.
The whole channel is quite hilarious and depressing at the same time.
Usually it’s just English exceptionalism and the centuries-old rivalry between both countries. Don’t expect much objectivity from either side. From Americans, it’s usually ignorance of a foreign language. Spanish-speaking Americans don’t tend to say this sort of thing.
> I’m reasonably competent in French and if there is such a feature, I don’t see it.
There is none.
It seems to require some 2nd language learning experience to realize “the 2nd language speaker is probably not advanced enough to know rare idiom X, therefore he probably means much more common idiom Y but has the grammar off.”
Travel most other countries, and you will notice that's not why French people get criticized by foreigners that experience the treatment.
My working assumption is that beyond meme, people have much worst pronunciation and grammer then they think.
Here's an anecdote that suggests it is nothing but malice in Paris.
My partner's mother is from France (not Paris) and extremely French. Has worked decades as a professor of French language. You'll have a hard time finding someone more proper in strict French language than her.
And yet, in Paris she is mocked for "not speaking French" and they pretend to not understand her even though her French is as perfect as it gets. It's just malice, if you're not a local.
I’m from Southern France but I have lived in Paris for a few years. I didn’t have a strong accent that would require subtitles on French TV like some people do, but I did have an accent. Nobody would mistake me for a local.
I think people over there are generally condescending and don’t care about you. I don’t think the accent is the issue. If not that they would find something else to complain about.
I was occasionally mocked for my accent but nothing that a stare and raising of my voice would not fix. Maybe staff is more likely to mess with a woman?
Anyway. Almost nobody is a local in Paris. People from all over France come there. They erase their accent and all pretend to be Parisians after a few years. Then they age and go back home to retire or raise a family in an affordable place.
These days I travel with my wife and switch from perfect English to perfect French and I get a bit of shock from the staff when this occurs. Nobody complains about my accent anymore, relieved they won’t have to deal with English for once. I must have a fairly weird and impossible to geographically locate accent nowadays after years of living abroad and speaking to expats. I’m no longer sounding like the caricature of the peasant from Southern France. Also my wife is a lot more friendly than me and generally would befriend staff members that can speak good English (foreigners or students) so I guess that helps.
Normandy area.
Plenty of people seem to have anecdotes that are hard to explain in any way other than malice. I have one of my own:
I was out camping with the family in france, I don't remember where exactly. As is tradition we managed to forget to bring the can opener. Cue my dad in the campstore with a can trying to get the shop keeper to sell us a can opener. How can you possibly need more than someone miming a can opener with a can saying "ouvrir" to get what he was trying to communicate? Never mind that his french was plenty fluid enough to hold a conversation with plenty of other french people.
I'm sure most french people are perfectly nice and do their best to understand foreigners. But -- at least the last time I was over there -- there are also more than enough french people who just straight up refuse to understand foreigners to leave a bitter taste in peoples mouth.
Then I realized that in English (especially American English) you have to accentuate the right syllabus or they won't understand you. Say you're going to "mounTAIN view" instead of "MOUNtain view" and they have no idea what place you're talking about.
British and Irish people will probably understand French-accented English better than Americans because of greater exposure to French.
/ˈmaʊntɪn/ MOUNtain
/mɒn'taɪn/ mounTAIN (?)
I think this is currently pretty typical in any language.
In my experience, Non-native speakers are much more resilient to strong accents and broken grammar. Probably because they themselves passed by this step.
I worked in a research laboratory with >100 nationalities: It was extremely common to be at a table with a Greek, a Spanish and a Chinese perfectly understanding each other in some "Globish English" while the British or Australian next chair were crying in tears.
Yes yes. I English speak very easy. I English hear too very easy. Easy understand. Can talk each other good just simple words. English very good.
*Ahem*
Basically, the built-in error correction functionality in English is bloody phenomenal. Literally anyone with a passing understanding and skill in English can use it to communicate effectively. This feature is seldom seen in most other languages let alone lingua francas.
And there's no evidence that English is special in it's ability serve as a lingua franca. In previous eras, other languages held this role (e.g, French, hence the term "lingua franca").
The dominance of English can be far more certainly attributed to the geopolitical dominance of english-speaking nations...
> Yes yes. I English speak very easy. I English hear too very easy. Easy understand. Can talk each other good just simple words. English very good.
Pretty easy to “translate” that to a broken yet still understandable version of other languages.
Any evidence of a language being stamped out by a despot?
> You can say things like lingua franca and everyone knows what you’re talking about.
Considering that the phrase is Latin, I am not sure what your point is.
> There aren’t any pronouns that depend on social status.
And many other quirks that are as alien to a native Japanese speaker than this is to you, however.
> It’s got a phonetic alphabet
What? Are we still talking about English here? FFS.
> It’s just a natural choice for commerce and knowledge-sharing.
It’s really not. Like all languages that ended up in similar situation (e.g. French, Arabic, Mandarin, or Latin), it is a combination of good old fashioned imperialism and commercial links.
Many languages have been wiped out by genocides, and wiping out a language is a common explicit tactic in ethnic cleansings.
English has never been the source of a serious campaign of this regard, though.
Rather than rigidly fight against new influence, it took new words while retaining some of it's own. It does this constantly.
Even Chaucer's English is difficult to decipher for a modern English speaker, and that isn't even that old.
What you are describing is the standard process by which languages change. It's not accurate to equate this with the systematic elimination of a linguistic group through ethnic cleansing, something which English has never experienced.
Brazil had a couple of instances of that. In the 18th century, the Marquis of Pombal implemented a program to extinguish usage of Tupi as the national language and replace it with Portuguese. That was successful. And then a second iteration when the Italian, German and Japanese communities of speakers in South Brazil were prevented from speaking their languages around the time of World War 2. This was successful too.
Police document declaring it illegal to speak German, Italian and Japanese in public:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Brazil_-_Proibido_falar_a...
Oh the irony!
The English tried to wipe out Gaelic use in Cornwall, Scotland, the Isle of Man and Ireland for centuries. Schools were told to punish children for speaking Gaelic, and to only speak English to their students. We succeeded in wiping out Cornish as a living language (sorry!). Manx and Irish Gaelic survived, though you can argue about Manx Gaelic (there was a revival around the time the last native speaker died).
Also, separately, your counterclaims are kind of... untrue? None of them are true of (e.g.) Mandarin which definitely served as a lingua franca for the ancient far east.
Source? On it's face this doesn't sound plausible...
I would bet that a part of it can probably be blamed more on Parisian being Parisian than on the French themselves :)
Oui oui. Je français parle très bien. Je entends français très bien aussi. Facile comprendre. Peux parler entre nous très bien juste mots simples. Français très bon.
Is just as understandable as the English original. French is much more forgiving than German in that regard, with a more flexible sentence structure. German and Russian the advantage of declension, which is a redundancy mechanism to indicate the role of a noun, but it’s an advantage over English just as much as over French. Also, it’s something a non-native will get wrong most of the time initially, so it’s not really helpful to help understand broken German.
Basically, I don’t think this is right and I tend to agree to “ many languages have this feature”, although I would say “most”.
In fact, many Creole language derived from French have this kind of simplified French structure as a core feature
French doesn't do this; as with English only the pronouns have vestigial accusative, and in any case most inflections are lost in speech because French drops consonants from the end of words. So you have to depend on strict word order to preserve meaning.
We have more special cases of past tense verbs and weird pronunciation, but I think it's easier to duck up and still make sense in English? Maybe.
English, by contrast, only has 8 regular inflections, across all parts of speech: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflection#Examples_in_English
English does have a rich ecosystem of compound verbs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compound_verb), but if this is taken to be part of the complexity of English verbs, I don't know how this stacks up to other languages.
Plus its orthography is ridiculously inconsistent, and a learner is never sure if they've got the right pronunciation when looking at a word because it's been caked over with N layers of different systems (Anglo-Saxon + Norse + Norman French + Latin + Greek etc)
I quit freelancing for a startup once because I missed half of their French English on meetings. Nowadays we have meetings with Mandarin Chinese and French and while a few of them have good English when others talk I give up.
Meanwhile with the same people native speakers from US and UK have no issues. I am amazed at how they can parse any gibberish thrown at them.
Did a fairly long trip in France, using as much French as I could. The speed of native French speakers meant comprehension was hard but manageable, and they seemed (almost intentionally at times), unable to make anything but what I would consider "travel French" work. I was fairly discouraged. I then met an Italian ski instructor who worked in France, and I could understand him quite well, and talked with him at a level (job, hobbies, family, reasons for travel) that I never achieved with a native speaker.
It was one of the most memorable moments of the trip and really gave me a feeling that we're all "citizens of the world" and not quite so divided by culture and lines on a map.
And young people learn to speak very quickly when they go to primary school (I don't know why).
Also there are lots of invented words by each generation like "wish" that you are ignorant if are not 10 years old.
I've travelled a bit, and learning to speak Global English is definitely a skill. My German wife is more understandable to the average SE Asian than I am, despite me being a native speaker. She uses less $5 words, and simpler sentence construction than I do. It's interesting (and a little galling) seeing my perfectly-constructed sentence fail to make any headway, while her simple English is immediately understood.
And yes, at times I've definitely reacted with "I understood that, but holy crap that was bad English". Whatever works I guess.
You just don't feel foreign language the way you feel own. Swearing in foreign language is just a word woth another meaning.
Not being bothered by bad grammar and what not is the same - butchered foreign language is not annoying nor more effort to understand. Butchered own language hurts ears the way foreign one does not.
I don't think so. Swear word is a swear word. It feels just as taboo to me.
I’m a non native speaker and it wasn’t until University when I met actual Americans that I realized my swearing could be ear-curling from time to time — I simply hadn’t noticed the reaction I got before in my life.
A simple example is the Swedish word “skit” and the English “shit”. In Swedish it’s actually pretty benign, for different reasons it’s not at all at the top of our swearing hierarchy: if you’d use “shit” in English in the same situations as you’d use “skit” in Swedish, English people will react.
So both in cases where there are cognates and a lack of actual experience with native speakers, there’s definitely a disconnect. I think any native speakers who have met good non native speakers have experienced this, they have 80-90% down but lack the cultural context (because where would it come from, movies isn’t enough)
But, when you swear in my language, I am bothered by it. It feels rude. Swearing in foreign language does not bother me at all. It does not feel rude.
Americans seem to struggle more than Brits. Perhaps it's because people in the UK are more used to strong Brittish accents and foreigners
For most people it's their 3rd or 4th or 5th language, and they were always so full of joy and happiness than I was trying my best. Nobody ever corrected my pronunciation or criticized me for my bad grammar and lack of vocabulary. (Cough, France, Cough). Thanks to all the encouragement and positivity I picked it up pretty quickly, and thoroughly enjoyed conversations with random locals all over the continent.
Actually, it was just as much fun as learning Spanish on the road in Central and South America.