The French do the same with all other languages, so fair game.
this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2024
689 points (97.5% liked)
memes
10217 readers
2091 users here now
Community rules
1. Be civil
No trolling, bigotry or other insulting / annoying behaviour
2. No politics
This is non-politics community. For political memes please go to !politicalmemes@lemmy.world
3. No recent reposts
Check for reposts when posting a meme, you can only repost after 1 month
4. No bots
No bots without the express approval of the mods or the admins
5. No Spam/Ads
No advertisements or spam. This is an instance rule and the only way to live.
Sister communities
- !tenforward@lemmy.world : Star Trek memes, chat and shitposts
- !lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world : Lemmy Shitposts, anything and everything goes.
- !linuxmemes@lemmy.world : Linux themed memes
- !comicstrips@lemmy.world : for those who love comic stories.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
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.
load more comments
(8 replies)
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.
Yup, much more likely
Depends. They also like to watch you to awkwardly stammer through your hardly recognizable French sentence just to reply in perfect English (or even your mother tongue in border regions).
My favourite is when they ignore you when you speak English (which isn't even your native language either, just the most likely language to be understood by both parties), then when you speak bad French, they reply on even worse English. Bonus points for those that do it to tourists in France and as tourists in other counties (both have happened to me but ofc I can't know if the same person would do both).
load more comments
(2 replies)
I'm French and foreign languages are one of my hobbies. I'm proficient in English and Spanish. I can at a lower level speak some Russian, German, Czech, and Italian.
Imho the fault lies in our education system which puts a heavy accent on STEM studies and tends to treat anything outside of that as lesser subjects.
Also from anecdotal evidence the younger generations are quite better than the older ones.
Exactly how heavy is the accent? And are we talking parisian or quebecois?
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(6 replies)
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.
load more comments
(1 replies)
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.
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.
load more comments
(1 replies)
I once turned down a really good job offer because it would have meant having to listen to French people try to speak English.
Were you being paid to watch that episode of The IT Crowd where they call French tech support?
I need to find out all about that, didn't watch much of the IT crowd
Baguette 👎
Long bread 👍
Don't reinvent the freedom fries again.
Are you from Montreal West Island?
Ah the good old english loyalists hiding on their mountain hoping the dirty french peasants won't touch them.
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?
South American countries too
Yeah, I actually realized I didn't mention that once I was off of lemmy a while. Brain not braining.
The cajuns and acadians in the USA beside the obvious that have already been named.
load more comments
(4 replies)
⚠️🚫☠️🤢fr*nch🤮☣️🚫⚠️ ₗₐₙ₉ᵤₐ₉ₑ, ₑᵥₑᵣᵧ բᵣₑₙ꜀ₕ ₚₑᵣₛₒₙ ᵢ'ᵥₑ ₘₑₜ ᵥᵥₐₛ ꜀ₒₒₗ
Incredibly based!
view more: next ›