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.
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.