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

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.