American tourists are far from the worst. In my experience they are usually nice people. I can't say the same of my fellow french tourists.

The article is rather funny as French are supposedly "terrible at foreign languages", but try to find a Briton that can speak anything else than English, it's like finding a needle in a haystack.

People say that, but do we have any proper data, preferably on assessed language knowledge rather than claimed language knowledge?

There's some crap going on in France that English is specified as a requirement for many jobs even when it quite obviously isn't needed. So people lie and nobody cares. On the other hand, it seems to me that people in England are overly modest about their language abilities. I think if you handed out written instructions in French or German on how to win £1000 then a lot of people who wouldn't normally claim to know any foreign languages would successfully follow the instructions.

It's hard for me to be exactly confident when comparing my 25-year-old GCSE grade C (or was it D?) in French to the current numerical grading system, but I think it's it's somewhere around the peaks of these graphs: https://ffteducationdatalab.org.uk/2024/04/languages-are-sti...

My grasp of French is so monumentally bad, that last time I tried to say "I can't speak French" in French, the French woman next to me didn't understand because I said it wrong.

My German is coming along OK, but only because I've been living in Berlin since late 2018.

... and that sort of attitude towards Americans is part of why Trump is able to play Europeans as a ambivalent-at-best bunch.