An anecdote from a trip to Paris, I walked into a store to look for a gift for someone back home. After making the greeting in French, I started to explain what I was looking for. The woman stopped me. With a dramatic eye roll she said, "Speak English, pleeeease."
An anecdote from a trip to Quebec city. My wife and I walked up to a hostess to inquire about getting a table for dinner. We greeted her in French. As soon as we started to ask about a table, she stopped us and said, "No no no no. This will be in English."
It's only two anecdotes. I may have simply run into rude people. But, they made me not care to ever speak French.
My daughter is taking Spanish in school right now. I'm learning a little as well. We have a large population of people around us from different Spanish speaking countries. They seem to be very tolerant of mistakes. I'm very much looking forward to learning more of their language.
Why did you think those people were rude, instead of, say, trying to be helpful?
French is difficult to understand when spoken badly, even for natives (maybe esp. for natives). We don't understand what people are trying to say -- really. We don't try to be condescending: we truly do. not. understand. I get that foreigners / tourists may not believe it, but it is true.
The reason why Parisians are so rude in this context, as I've heard from several French natives, is that time is money. Most interactions with tourists in Paris are transactional. If a shopkeeper or restaurant server can spend two minutes with one customer in not-perfect French, or 30 seconds in not-perfect English, and there is no recreational value for the Parisian to the slower choice, then the Parisian will renegotiate the discussion's language to the faster choice.
You could call that helpful if you're optimizing for fastest transaction. For tourists who might have spent years in school learning the French language, and many recent weeks on Duolingo refreshing before the trip, and who are optimizing for a richer local experience, it's thoughtless and rude. Both viewpoints are rational.
It's not what they said that was rude. It's the way they said it.
Also I doubt that French is objectively harder to understand when spoken poorly than most languages. Especially when you consider tonal languages like Vietnamese and Mandarin.
Difficulty in understanding non native speakers is largely subjective. It depends heavily on the perception of the listener.
Basically if the listener believes that it is difficult, it will be. Additionally, the harder the listener tries to engage with and understand the non-native speaker, the easier it becomes.
French could be unique among languages, but my strong suspicion is that if what you describe is true for most French speakers, it's mostly due to a widespread cultural perception that non-native French speakers are hard to understand rather than objective difficulty.
There is a professor at Georgia State University who's primary research focus is on this topic if you're interested in reading more.
> There is a professor at Georgia State University who's primary research focus is on this topic if you're interested in reading more. http://www2.gsu.edu/~eslsal/cv.htm
Untrue: the last time I was in Portugal, I had a couple of marvelous conversations in my lousy French with older Portuguese shopkeeps (whose French was probably similarly lousy -it is more common among older people to speak French than English, as many of their generation emigrated to France for work). I'm pretty sure the French dislike how accented, goofy foreigners sound when mispronouncing their language. I always found it a relief when they switched to much better English, as French is pretty hard.
I now have some lousy Portuguese, so we'll see if the Portuguese people are more gregarious with their language or if they ask me to fall back to French.
As a French living in France, here is my take on it.
Your two anecdotes do seem rude, however I would personally have asked the same thing, but in a different way, like "We could continue in English if you want" with probably a slight incentive in my tone to actually switch to English (sorry if I also appear a bit rude). Or Maybe I will just reply to your every question in English.
A native English speaker is blessed, English has become the de facto lingua franca of the World which means learning a foreign language generally is a luxury. For everybody else, it's more of a necessity, and you tend to be exposed to English in your everyday life, at least to some degree (films, tv shows, technical documentation, meetings if you work within an international team), so chances are the person you are talking to is actually more fluent in English that you are in French (and it's also valid for any other language).
It also means it's somewhat harder to actually learn a foreign language as a native English. As a personal experience, one of my colleagues is American, but wants to settle in France, so he is trying to learn French, and sometimes, we actually start speaking in French, but after one or two minutes, we switch to English. I just see my colleague struggling and I know the conversation would be easier in English. I feel a little guilty about it.
Lastly, but a bit out of topic, there might be some small cultural differences. Just to illustrate, In an American restaurant, the waiter will ask you if everything is ok at least once or twice during the course of the meal, in a French restaurant, he will take your order and leave you alone until you finish eating your dish (and then ask you if you want a desert, a coffee or the bill).
I would have appreciated your approach. When I studied French we focused on reading and writing, not speaking. So, I was admittedly not a strong French speaker. I can understand their frustration. Had I been given the choice I might have chosen English.
You've been to American restaurants and only been interrupted once or twice by waiters? You were quite blessed then. Ordinarily, we expect conversations to be interrupted 5-6 times per meal. (I'm only slightly exaggerating.) Here's a true story illustrating how ridiculous it gets. I proposed to my wife in our favorite restaurant. I chose purposefully an early dinner time so we would have the restaurant to ourselves. As I began to kneel and pull the engagement ring out of my pocket, a busboy stepped between my wife and I to refill our water glasses. It was a bit awkward for about 20 seconds or so.
> An anecdote from a trip to Quebec city. My wife and I walked up to a hostess to inquire about getting a table for dinner. We greeted her in French. As soon as we started to ask about a table, she stopped us and said, "No no no no. This will be in English."
Native Québecois here. That's most definitely very odd.
The typical scenario is someone not fluent in French attempts to speak it, and the other person switches to English as a courtesy, not as a slight against you; many people forget or don't know that most Québecois in major cities are bilingual.
Simply mentioning that you would like to continue in French so that you can practice will elicit gratitude and wide smiles - we really, really, really like it when people speak French, no matter the quality, and most will happily help you learn a few extra words or expressions.
I had a similar experience in Paris. "No, no, no, monsieur; we make this easy for everyone and do it in English." Depending on your mood and charitable inclinations, that's either supremely helpful or amazingly condescending.
It's gonna be interesting for me. I'm about to move to Montreal (flight is in 2 days). I want to learn French very well to idle-mine immigration points. I'm gonna make mistakes. That's just how it is. The surest path to success is failure.
It's sometimes difficult in Montreal due to how easy it is to get around in English; people will by default switch to English to help you out, and almost everyone is bilingual to some degree.
Just stick to your guns of speaking in French and let people know you want to practice, and you'll do great!
And congratulations on the move! It's a wonderful city. So wonderful that I'm moving back there in a month after being in the Toronto region for almost 10 years.
We enjoyed Quebec and Montreal. The singular rude experience didn't diminish it. We're eager to introduce our daughter to both cities now that she's old enough to appreciate them.
Sure, I am passionate about Russian grammar too, and I used to correct mistakes of native Russians writing in Russian (I stopped doing that when I learned that dyslexia is quite real and common, and I now feel sorry for that).
However, any foreigner trying to speak Russian, no matter how broken or incorrect, will meet nothing but praise and encouragement from other Russians.
Except the lady who sells subway tickets in Moscow. That lady is quite grumpy.
(Everyone else was kind.)
I took immersive classes, speaking 6 hours / day, 90 minutes spent on pronunciation drills. The only downside is my accent got better faster than my vocab, confusing lots of people with whom I interacted.
That's too bad, but I have a hopeful story for you.
I have a few years of high school and college French fortified by a couple months spent living in Lyon with a French family. Other than an hour between CDG and the TGV station, I'd never been to Paris until 2016, which was long after my French studies.
That 2016 trip was disappointing. I'd mentally rehearse the restaurant order while looking at the menu, or check Google Translate for the exact words describing the thing I needed from the store, and I had the same experience as you: a strong feeling I was exceedingly boring to the other person, and please let's switch to the easy path to get this drudgery over with. Speaking French was a big attraction to why I was looking forward to going to France. It was a letdown.
But three years later, in 2019, I found myself back in Paris, and this time I had several successful non-phatic discussions with natives that I'd characterize as enjoyable in any language. What changed?
Strangely enough, the change was learning Mandarin, which I started doing last year. Aside from my being an adult, Mandarin is hard for anyone to learn as a second language, so I never expected to reach conversational fluency in it. And my resulting attitude every time I'm talking to a native Mandarin speaker is "well, fuck it, I'm never going to be good at this, but I have to start somewhere, so let's just try to assemble what I'm thinking out of the 500 words I know, and see what happens." It's a totally different attitude from my well-studied, well-schooled, well-read, but not well-practiced French brain. And while I still concede I'll never be fluent in Mandarin, I'm saying an awful lot more to Mandarin speakers than I would have a single year into my French studies.
This lack of inhibition led into a better experience in France. I didn't bother trying to construct full, stammering sentences in restaurants. I just said the numbers and nouns and gave one-word answers to whatever the server asked -- insisting on switching to English would have actually prolonged our time together. But in circumstances where conversation would have helped pass the time -- cab ride where the driver looks like he's wondering something about us, or standing in line where all of us were clearly confused by the same situation, etc. -- I just went for it, with the same fuck-it attitude, and it worked out. We had our short, meaningful, optional conversations that scratched the "I spoke real French in real France" itch.
In short, yes, unfortunately, the problem really is you (and me). But it's fixable. Stop thinking "I'm about to speak French." Just let it happen.
> It's only two anecdotes. I may have simply run into rude people. But, they made me not care to ever speak French.
Oddly, my experience has been the opposite. Most of the places I have gone to in Paris spoke very little to no English but were trying to be very helpful anyway and I HAD to use my broken French.
However, I could tell that we didn't really hit the "standard" tourist shops (stayed just off École Militaire).
I will say that most English speakers tend to be VERY tolerant of mistakes. I think it's a combination of:
1) There is no single "native" English.
Think about how different people from different socioeconomic classes in the US, Canada, UK, India, etc. sound. And they are all native English speakers!
2) English is really agglomerative and absorbs neologisms readily.
Think about how quickly typhoon and tycoon entered the language, for example. Can you picture that kind of evolution for any other language?
In this way Belgium is much better in my experience. Especially in Brussels people are really tolerant of poor French (presumably due to the two language situation).
> An anecdote from a trip to Quebec city. My wife and I walked up to a hostess to inquire about getting a table for dinner. We greeted her in French. As soon as we started to ask about a table, she stopped us and said, "No no no no. This will be in English."
I was under the impression (having never been to Quebec) that she was in fact breaking the law by doing this.
As someone who lives in Quebec, I assure you that the government does not legislate what languages people can speak. They're picky about signs and menus and whatever, but you can't tell people what language to speak. There was a motion in the legislature to urge people not use "Bonjour-Hi" as a greeting, but that's not binding, and cannot be.
It's a little shocking that you're under this impression. The Charter of the French Language in Quebec ensures the right of consumers to be informed and served in French. It does not prevent people from serving you in English or any other language for that matter.
If they insisted to be served in French then they would have to be served in French, but what little of the situation has been detailed this does not seem to be the case.
I think it's ambiguous. At what point is there a refusal, and what degree of insistence is required? Someone initiates a request for service in French, the response is "no, no, no this will be in English". Has that person refused to conduct the transaction in French?
I suppose the person requesting service could be more forceful about insisting on being served in French, but does someone have to go through a second round of insisting/refusing before service has been denied? And what words count as insisting (id that is required), what words count as refusal? "No, no, no, this will be in English" seems very close to a refusal to me.
I wouldn't be surprised if this has been formally litigated in Canada, it'd be interesting to know.
An anecdote from a trip to Quebec city. My wife and I walked up to a hostess to inquire about getting a table for dinner. We greeted her in French. As soon as we started to ask about a table, she stopped us and said, "No no no no. This will be in English."
It's only two anecdotes. I may have simply run into rude people. But, they made me not care to ever speak French.
My daughter is taking Spanish in school right now. I'm learning a little as well. We have a large population of people around us from different Spanish speaking countries. They seem to be very tolerant of mistakes. I'm very much looking forward to learning more of their language.