I am actually fully bilingual eng/fr, went to school in french, but have a particular regional Canadian accent. Whenever in France, everyone responds in English anyways. They don’t like the accent at all. After ordering a beer at a bar in the latin quarter after checking into my hotel, an older woman sitting at the bar as a customer turned to me and said “Vous parlez mal”. i.e. You speak badly.
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BootLoop@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Me studying French so that I can refuse to speak it I immediately get a response in English whenever I attempt to speak it
Thedogdrinkscoffee@lemmy.ca 22 hours ago
Enoril@jlai.lu 11 hours ago
It takes me about 15min before being able to understand the canadian accent and stop trying to recognize every words. That requires a lot of concentration to decipher each words. During my first meeting with Canadians, we had to switch back to English has it was easier to understand.
It’s like when you talk to an old farmer lost in the middle of nowhere and you need subtitles to understand the words. That requires practice!
baldingpudenda@lemmy.world 21 hours ago
In my year learning French at school, I befriended someone in toulouse and we’d have quick occasional video chats. The face she made while i was talking made it seem like i was doing nails on chalkboard. She visibly squirmed a bit.
My teacher on the other hand noticed I pronounced certain words in a toulousian accent and was pleased. Apparently it’s a nice accent. It’s too bad i didn’t keep going. Could have visited France and terrorized the locals by forcing them to listen to me speak.
SorryQuick@lemmy.ca 16 hours ago
Vous parlez mal". i.e. You speak badly. I’ll never forget the horror in her eye
It’s funny that she would think that our french is worse than theirs, when canadian french is closer to actual french than parisian french.
Pulptastic@midwest.social 9 hours ago
Is it closer?
What is “actual French”?
SorryQuick@lemmy.ca 6 hours ago
Well if you go back 500 years, every little corner of france has their own version of french, with Paris speaking roughly what they speak today. Canadians descend from other regions, mostly the north and west and inherited their way of speaking. So I call it “actual french” but really I just mean the french that was most common at the time, since this was the most populated region of france with a lot less people living in Paris.
This can be traced to a variety of sounds that we have in canadian french that are present throughout France as accents but not in the modern “standard french”. Such as the “eu” in “beurre”.
I don’t really have a source for this, this is what they teach us in school.
CubitOom@infosec.pub 1 day ago
I was told my pronunciation was fine but what gave me away as an American was how long I took to say bonjour.
Axolotl_cpp@feddit.it 1 day ago
Now i wonder jow long you take to say bonjour
snooggums@piefed.world 1 day ago
I'm hoping they draw it for about 5 seconds like I do.
CubitOom@infosec.pub 1 day ago
Normally, at about 10 feet away I try to make eye contact and smile/nod during approach, then I’ll verbally greet at about 5 feet away.
This was something I learned while working at a resort and it stuck with me. By American standards, this is considered fast and early.
janus2@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
you’re telling me the opening sequence of Beauty and the Beast is culturally accurate!?
cobysev@lemmy.world 1 day ago
CubitOom@infosec.pub 1 day ago
Clearly that man is Italian
Godric@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Bong-sewer!
Soapbox@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
That’s pretty much why I am studying it.
socsa@piefed.social 1 day ago
Me, understanding that my superpower is that I feed on sarcasm and eye rolls.
cobysev@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I was stationed in Germany with the US military once, just 30 minutes from the French border. My American coworkers visited Paris and complained that everyone there were snobbish assholes. Every time they tried to ask someone for directions, they got ignored at best and insulted at worst.
My wife and I went to Paris a few times and we had the complete opposite experience. We both took several years of French in high school, so we had an extremely basic knowledge of the French language (thanks, American public schools! 🙄) and we tried to speak to people in French.
Every time we spoke up, they would notice us struggling and immediately switch to English for us. And then they were very helpful. Turns out, my coworkers were just speaking English to French people and expecting a response in English. Which insulted a lot of French people, so they ignored them.
TL;DR: Speak the local language as best you can and French people can be very nice and helpful. Just assume they’ll speak English and you’ll get some rude responses in kind.
SippyCup@lemmy.ml 59 minutes ago
In my experience,French people in Paris really don’t want you speaking French. They almost all speak English and find bad accents irritating.
When we got to our hotel I went to the front desk and said “hey I’m sorry I don’t speak much French but we have a reservation.” And the lady who was Swiss looked at me and said “but you’re speaking French now” and proceeded to tell me a bunch of stuff. Then she saw my face and started laughing. That little razz was one of the highlights of that trip. Any time I spoke French to anyone else they would wince and switch to English. Except for the Italian guy at one of the restaurants we went to, he was pretty cool about it.
Outside of Paris, the French people were really cool about working with my bad, broken French. Possibly because they didn’t speak any more English than I did French. Usually less.
Evkob@lemmy.ca 21 hours ago
French is my first language, Parisians were still assholes who switched to English because they didn’t like the way I spoke French.
Everyone outside Paris was cool, but I totally get the stereotypes about Parisians. I don’t entirely blame them, living in a city that gets that much tourism must suck, but I am still salty at the guy working in a pizza place who served our party entirely in broken English despite us only speaking French to him.
InternetCitizen2@lemmy.world 1 day ago
😐
Hmmm
mang0@lemmy.zip 22 hours ago
I’ve had an experience where I simply asked a french cashier if they spoke english and she threw a fit. Spoke to me in French and mixed my items with the next customer’s.
doingthestuff@lemy.lol 1 day ago
I had shitty American school French when I went to Paris and I did my best, and nearly everyone said they didn’t speak any English which I knew was a fucking lie. I have since decided not to speak French. I’ve still got Dutch, German, Korean and a little bit of Norwegian on top of English. France is the only country in Europe I don’t want to visit again. Rural France was better but I still don’t plan to go back.