If you realize that people in Paris have lives (not unlike New York), and don't accost everyone you see for directions to X before looking at a map, and you actually introduce yourself when talking to a local, you'll have a great time.
And while I speak French, I also spent a lot of time with my sister speaking English, and the language used didn't seem to matter. If you can drop the tourist mentality, just go, hang out in cafés, and actually experience the culture and Paris lifestyle, you'll find Parisians are perfectly nice people, possibly a little busy, and the attitude stems more from dealing with hordes of people that come from foreign places who apparently can't be bothered to learn manners...
And another thing I've noticed, we have some tourist spots here (Canada), namely the rocky mountains and national parks, and Japanese tourists will come in hordes, on buses, taking pictures of everything and not really interacting with anyone else. That's a recipe for disappointment...
It's more a case of the stress of living in a big city, and in that respect mirrors the reputations that New York and London have in their own country (it always makes me chuckle to hear Americans complaining about how abrupt New Yorkers are, as a non-American I consider the baseline of friendliness of Americans to be so high that even the lower than average New Yorker still rates high on the friendliness scale in a global sense).