You must log in or register to comment.
I’m French Canadian. A friend of mine lives in Paris. I go to Paris fairly often. When I’m there, I speak exclusively English to anyone I don’t know.
If I speak French, my god damn native tongue, they either make sure to tell me my accent is horrendous or they reply in German. In either case, they take this condescending tone… You know the one.
When I speak English, not only do I have the upper hand on the language, but they don’t know I can understand them perfectly. Win win for me.
Vous êtes chiants, les Parisiens.
In France they are known for this thing with their language where anything that doesn’t sound like parisine french they call it “patois” (I think I wrote it correctly?). You probably won’t have this problem if you go to the south of France.
The funny part is that quebecois split off of Classical French, and the bastardized version they speak in France now is farther away from classical than quebecois.
The French do the same with all other languages, so fair game.
All those people online with their anecdotes agreeing with what you wrote, yet my experience has been the complete opposite. I think the problem is Americans being insufferable assholes, and the French not letting that fly as much as other countries.
Germany’s 2nd most spoken language is English, by 32% of the population.
Germany’s 3rd most spoken language is French, by 9% of the population.
France’s 2nd most spoken language is English, by 24% of the population.
France’s 3rd most spoken language is Spanish, by 9% of the population.
UK’s 2nd most spoken language is French, by 16% of the population.
UK’s 3rd most spoken language is German, by 5% of the population.
Source: https://languageknowledge.eu/
While you could say that France is a bit behind the curve in comparison with most other Northern European countries, native English speakers are far worse at learning any other language. I’m not even French, but the circle-jerk English speaking communities have about French people sometimes gets pretty embarrassing.
It says a ton about the people who liked this meme that actual language data is getting downvoted. Racism doesn’t care about facts.
One time when my mom visited France, she asked a shop’s clerk for directions. She tried French but kind of gave up and used some English words scattered throughout her sentence for words she didn’t know. The clerk acted annoyed and pretended not to understand, so my mom tried to use only her broken French. The clerk responded very quickly in French.
My mom then said, in English, “I’m sorry, I didn’t get that, French is such a beautiful language but I’m having a hard time learning it”. The clerk then completely 180’ed her attitude, acted all happy and switched to perfect, fluent English, with almost no French accent.
That situation taught me that some French people apparently just want you to suck the metaphorical dick of their culture before they choose to be nice to you lol.
Nobody likes the fact that English tourists think they just can skip trying to learn a language when they visit another country. That being said, your mom was clearly trying so yeah I would have cut her some slack right away.
If I had to learn the language of every country I ever visited I would have never had time to visit those countries.
Does Lemmy have some thing against French?
Oh, an Anglo Canadian living in Quebec I see
Ive had to drive through quebec so many times. My french isn’t the best but i will try and communicate with someone for either food or directions. It blows my mind at how some people can just tell you are english and then they stop talking to you or they get this disgusting look on their face.
Lol. That’s really hard to believe. The main complain I’ve heard was that people will actually switch to english when they can tell you speak english, making it impossible to practice. But hey, we live in the world’s most friendly country, where everyone is welcome (except those disgusting natives and french canadian, /s).
I live very close to the Quebec border and I’ve never once in my life experienced this. My French isn’t all that great and not once did a Québécois give me a hard time. If anything they were super patient and were happy to see an Ontarian do their best to speak the language.
Fun fact : if you write french with the last grammar modernization, and with the gender minority inclusivity, you could being correct AND pissed off a lot of french speaker.
“you could be correct and piss off a lot of French speakers”. Just fuck off, frog.
Just like Werner Herzog
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pY-0JfEdLY
You could only get some French out of me with a gun pointed at my head… It actually happened to me…
Let’s be honest, who actually speaks French outside of Canada and France?
Some places in africa, and some islands in the indian, and pacific oceans?
Woking with people from southern Europe (seen from Sweden), sadly a lot. Belgians, Luxemburgians, French (🤢), Swiss, and the list continues.
I really hope this is some sort of joke as I didn’t mean to spark racism…
It definitely is not a joke - their inability and refusal to make themselves understood is a real problem.
The only solution is to boycott them all and dig out their countries and separate them from the rest of Europe (/s)
Maybe this isn’t the place for blatant discrimination
Baguette 👎
Long bread 👍
Don’t reinvent the freedom fries again.
