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French people always get criticized for not understanding foreigners' broken French. It is not out of malice. It is because it actually is very hard to underst

• yieldcrv 3y ago
  sounds like people in west african countries have a superior understanding of the purpose of language, which is to convey shared concepts
  • dudul 3y ago
    No, it's just that they were themselves learning French, so used to speaking broken French. You would get the same experience by gathering a German, an Australian and a Venezuelan all learning French as 2nd or 3rd language. Additionally they most likely already knew English and were able to decipher "French broken by an English speaker". Edit: and since we're sharing anecdotes. I got the same "rude" treatment from Russians when I was learning Russian in Russia, or from Swedish folks when learning Swedish in Stockholm. It's just hard for native speakers to deal with broken linguo, that's just how it is. Swedish people would even reply to me in English, some would call it rude, they were just trying to be helpful and efficient.
    • grecy 3y ago
      > Additionally they most likely already knew English and were able to decipher "French broken by an English speaker". No, they did not speak English. If they had, I wouldn't have subjected them to my French.
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    • freeney 3y ago
      I don’t think this issue is about the French spoken in West Africa being 'broken.' Or that 'they were themselves learning French'… Rather, it reflects the tolerance and adaptability inherent in multilingual societies like those in West Africa. People are simply more accustomed to communicating across different languages and more accepting of non-native speakers and various accents, even if they are native speakers themselves. Ironically this tolerance as opposed to the supposed academic perfection of the language spoken in France makes use of the language as it was initially intended when it was created a lingua franca meant to be used by a wide variety of people. In France however there is often less tolerance for varying pronunciations and accents, not everyone is the same in that regard but it’s definitely something people experience in France (we would wish that maybe they would resort to English sometime to continue the conversation or correcting us but this is much less likely too). This isn't just about non-native speakers but also applies to native French speakers from regions like Quebec or Congo. Despite using similar vocabulary, they sometimes face challenges being understood in France, mainly due to their distinct accents, I mean I believe this also occurs between various region of France
      • dudul 3y ago
        > . In France however there is often less tolerance for varying pronunciations and accents, Yes this was covered in my original message. Miss pronouncing a word in French can make it extremely hard to understand for a native speaker. And yes people from Quebec are an excellent example. They will often struggle when their accent is too strong when visiting France. And people are not ill meaning, Quebecois are very popular in France, it's just genuinely hard. People often don't know that the French language was literally a political weapon to create France. France is political construct, not cultural like most countries. It is an aggregation of different cultures, including different languages. It was vital for France to succeed as a construct to force the idea of "correct French". A French language that would be the same everywhere, without local variations. So yeah, the French ear is not used to dealing with mistakes or strong accents.
• heywhatupboys 3y ago
  French is the lingua franca of much of the world....
  • vlovich123 3y ago
    What criteria are you using? ~320M French speakers globally (220M native, official language for 29 countries) ~559M Spanish speakers (~480M native, 20 countries) ~1.1B Mandarin speakers globally (a few countries, mother tongue in ~20 countries) ~1.5B English speakers globally (~400M native, official language for 67 countries) So for much of the world it seems pretty clearly English (& has been since WWII) and French is in the “second” tier competing with Spanish and Mandarin (probably just behind Spanish & Mandarin in terms of penetration lingua franca is about being the bridge language).
    • Koshkin 3y ago
      Yet, somehow I have no problem calling French 'franca'...
      • lm28469 3y ago
        You do realize that "franca" here has nothing to do with French or France ? Neither today nor originally
        • vasco 3y ago
          I did not know the origin at all so looked it up: > Based mostly on Northern Italy's languages (mainly Venetian and Genoese) and secondarily on Occitano-Romance languages (Catalan and Occitan) in the western Mediterranean area at first, Lingua Franca later came to have more Spanish and Portuguese elements, especially on the Barbary Coast (now referred to as the Maghreb). Lingua Franca also borrowed from Berber, Turkish, French, Greek and Arabic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean_Lingua_Franca https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean_Lingua_Franca
        • Koshkin 3y ago
• grecy 3y ago
  > People weren't correcting you to mock you. They wanted to understand and probably help you No. In France they openly showed their disgust at my French and refused even to speak to me.
  • dudul 3y ago
    For the reaction to be so strong I wonder if there was more than just broken French. Always easy to go with the super nice tourist/mean for no reason autoctone. Anyway, sorry you had this experience.
  • bwb 3y ago
    That is very weird, I've spent a few months in France almost every year for the last 8 years and never had one bad experience. My wife speaks beginner French and not had any issues either. I know enough to order, please, thank you, nicely ask if they speak english, etc… Was this one situation or multiple? What was the context?
  • mp05 3y ago
    During my first trip to Paris, I was at a patisserie in an admittedly tourist-y part of town and the gentleman behind the counter yelled at me and insist I speak English when ordering. So in Paris stopped attempting to speak to them in French. However, people in Beaune and Chamonix humored me.
  • kergonath 3y ago
    > No. In France they openly showed their disgust at my French and refused even to speak to me. No. It’s most probably in your head and is inconsistent with everything I have seen or heard. Or you were unintentionally rude, maybe. There are pricks everywhere so I don’t doubt that someone was like that, but I seriously doubt that the people in general were.
• forty 3y ago
  Yes, I'm French and I often have a hard time understanding French even correct, with a strong accent I'm not used to. I remember, when I was ~15 I met a guy from RDC (Congo) and it was very awkward for me as he was speaking French with a Belgian and African accent which even with all the best intent I could not understand, while he understood me just fine. We ended up speaking in English (it was in London so I pretended wanting to improve my English :))
• Koshkin 3y ago
  Interestingly, I could not help but notice that, being neighbors and all, both the English and the French are by far the worst offenders in terms of how broken one's pronunciation of the language of the other usually is.
  • seszett 3y ago
    We understand each other's broken accent really well though. So it doesn't really matter.
  • BurningFrog 3y ago
    Probably doesn't help that 1/3 of English is imported and mangled French words.
    • yawboakye 3y ago
      while 1/2 of french is imported and mangled latin. so where did english borrow from really? given that it’s easier to figure out the latin roots of the anglicized?
      • ekianjo 3y ago
        The normand invasion of England and political control for 400 years changed the English language for sure. The medieval English and the modern English are completely different. Medieval French and modern French, not so much.
        • gerdesj 3y ago
          I'm not sure what 400 years of Norman political control really means. There was an invasion of England in 1066 by William the Bastard, Duke of Normandy, which ended up with King William I of England. Subsequent monarchs of England/bits of France were no longer Normans per se. At least one variety of a French language at the time was introduced, wholesale, and became the court language of England. Latin of course remained the really "important" language of the Church and increasingly the law. There are roughly three named "ages" of English (in England): old, middle and modern. I can just about understand written middle English and have severe problems with old English. Modern English can be very flexible, which is probably why it has become popular as a lingua franca. There are no real noun genders. Word order can be fiddled with mercilessly too. Officially, English sentences are subject - verb - object (SVO) for example: "I sat on the bed". You can say "I the bed sat on" or "On the bed sat I" or "sat I on the bed" and it still works fine. Most of those variants are regionally correct, somewhere. English spelling is an absolute nightmare! Linking pronunciation to spelling is absolutely awful. I can completely understand English as a second language speakers throwing their hands up in the air and declaring the whole thing as complete bollocks! However, that means that we are extraordinarily tolerent of speling mistaks. field or feild? sealed or ceiled? Who nose!
• triceratops 3y ago
  > It is because it actually is very hard to understand broken French. A lot of very different words sound similar. They frivolously expend with the consonants at the ends of words. All that additional signal just thrown away! /s
• dataflow 3y ago
  > French people always get criticized for not understanding foreigners' broken French The main criticism I've heard is kind of the opposite - that they dislike foreigners not trying to speak French, and just starting communication in English. If both of these are true then I guess that puts foreigners in a tough place where they're damned if they try and damned if they don't?
  • Swizec 3y ago
    I’ve had extraordinary luck with broken French in France. If you start in French and do your best, a lot of people suddenly speak fluent English. Especially in metro areas. But the experience does not compare to traveling with my partner who speaks fluent zero-accent French. Paris turns into a different much nicer city when you pair with a native speaker. That said, you’ll never get the level of service you see in USA. The French (Europe in general) just don’t care that much about customer UX. You either do it their way or you can leave.
    • jimmaswell 3y ago
      Europe as a whole has always come off as unpleasant to visit as an American, from what I've read online such as this thread. In no American city I've been to do you have to be so vigilant for pickpockets as you apparently do in European cities, and virtually no one in America will complain about your accent or grammar. We have free water at restaurants, and the staff won't treat you like a mooch for asking about it; in fact most staff of any business will make at least a basic attempt to be pleasant towards you. You get your money's worth in food portions at restaurants, the taxes are cheaper, you won't be arrested and fined for making a rude tweet.. why exactly would I want to visit Europe?
      • qwytw 3y ago
        > why exactly would I want to visit Europe? To see stuff? US doesen't really have that have much besides nature worth seeing/experiencing from a traditional tourist perspective. Almost all the cities besides a handful are extremely boring in comparison (and in those worth visiting like SF you're very likely to get stabbed by a drug addict or even shot)*. To be honest besides not having free water in restaurants (if I have to ask it's already not free (emotionally)) none of those other things you've mentioned seem like a big deal for me. > vigilant for pickpockets In some places? Sure. But IMHO even in notorious cities like Barcelona it's not really that bad. * well that's certainly not true.. but if you base your opinion on what some Europeans might be saying on Reddit/etc. you might end up believing stuff like this.
• passwordoops 3y ago
  > People weren't correcting you to mock you. They wanted to understand and probably help you I'm (an anglophone) from Quebec and worked in Europe for a while. Parisians totally mock people not speaking Parisian French. They're even open and extraordinarily condescending about it. The rest of the country is cool and generally helpful
  • OnlyMortal 3y ago
    I met French speaking Quebecois in Paris. They were complaining the Parisians didn’t understand them. They weren’t enamoured to France.
    • passwordoops 3y ago
      Also that Parisians treat them like a backwater colony. That really doesn't sit well with the narrative that Quebec was always an independent people who were only ever under colonial rule after the evil English came along. Oh, and there were never any issues with the natives until the Brits. Source: my grade school kids' history texts
      • ekabod 3y ago
        Nobody in France is treating Quebec as a backwater colony, not even as a colony. It is all in your head. Quebec has a very good image in France.
        • coldtea 3y ago
          You'd be surprised. Though I think you've misunderstood the parent's comment. THe parent doesn't literally mean that they think of Quebec as a colony. He means that they look down upon Quebec people, as if they are "ploucs" [from some backwater colony], without their French "sophistication" and accent.
          • ttoinou 3y ago
            But parisians think that of the whole world, so it's not particulary meaningful. If you're hurt by parisian attitude, you've failed the "I shouldn't give a fuck" test they're making you pass ;)
• saiya-jin 3y ago
  I interact with french in France for some 13 years, spending most weekends there (Chamonix! but all over the place from east to west to south, not much north yet). First of all, french is not some beautiful language once you grok the grammar, rather pretty weird and old layered 'spaghetti code' with tons of exceptions to tons of obscure rules (nothing, absolutely nothing elegant there). Its needlessly complex especially when you know other languages solved it much better, and as with other bureaucratic stuff in France any attempt for reform failed. English to non-native (in both of those) is a beautiful magnificent blessing in comparison, you can be proficient with little, french will literally look puzzled at you and get really quickly fed up with you. Patience is really not a typical french virtue. But I guess if you like the feeling of struggling for whole life, looked down upon and gain motivation from it then its great. Second, I don't know details of how schools work in France (seems a rather toxic place pushing way too hard for competitiveness but I may be wrong here), but I see result every day also in cca 50% of my colleagues - people are absolutely snobbish in the worst possible manner about their language to the point of being sometimes toxic, and automatically scowl at any tiny mistake. Guess what, as a foreigner trying to learn language you will make tons of them, even on C2 level. There is absolutely minimum help, they will just laugh at you like bunch of small kids, literally mocking you and pointing fingers at you. I mean 50+ years old higher managers bursting into laugh how stupid you are. Every single time. Schooling and overall mindset make french people behave like arrogant folks a lot (not so much say folks from African colonies, much much nicer folks to interact with; same for Swiss french and cca Belgians too. Don't know much about Quebec folks, but in casual conversation french mock and insult them behind their back pretty horribly). I've never ever been mocked by natives for making even basic mistakes in any other language, its just part of basic human decency. I've seen recently shock and disgust among young French that some french local paragliding teacher exposed to decades of english-speaking tourists used some english words in his french. Those were some otherwise smart folks. I've had my very good American friend who is overweight literally gave up on french and France, on his month long trip there they were insulting and mocking him in the bars and restaurants, in hotels, in trains etc (I talk about staff, not other tourists). Man, I have hundreds of stories like this, unfortunately very consistent. I know 5 languages, 3 of them very different compared to my native one, and French is by far the worst of them to learn and just use it (I know there are worse, just describing my experiences). French folks need to come in terms of not being superpower nor center of the world anymore and accepting there is more than their language in the world. I've visited every continent (apart from Antarctica) and generally travelled a lot and literally nowhere I felt so little welcomed and rather just tolerated due to money bringing in like in France. A truly beautiful place, history, cuisine, nature, but neither me, nor my wife (who studied in Lyon for quite some time) nor folks around us in similar situation certainly don't travel there for the local people, which is often the most important aspect of my traveling when going for exotics. /sorry for long rant
• pmontra 3y ago
  A French friend of mine told me: get the pronunciation right, then it doesn't matter if the words are wrong.
• featuregag 3y ago
  Broken anything is hard to understand without practice, and easy (or, easier) to understand with practice. My experience in urban US is you hear a lot of broken English, so you get pretty good at understanding it. My experience living in Paris is that a lot of the older folks have very little practice or desire to practice speaking with broken French speakers. Japan I found to be similar. Fuck up the pronunciation the slightest bit and you’re just stared at blankly.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• WalterBright 3y ago
  > it's probably kind of the same in English "Come out with your hands up, or I'll sh*t!"
• coldtea 3y ago
  >French people always get criticized for not understanding foreigners' broken French. It is not out of malice. It is because it actually is very hard to understand broken French. Is it that difficult? I can understand broken French just fine as a non native speaker. For French people it looks as if it's impossible, but I don't buy it. >People weren't correcting you to mock you. They wanted to understand and probably help you. Judging from how indifferent and unhelpful retail workers, waiters, and such were, even when you speak perfect French or even when speaking in English in case they understand it, I doubt that's the case.
  • arkh 3y ago
    > Judging from how indifferent and unhelpful retail workers, waiters, and such were Did you start your interaction with a "Bonjour" at least? "Customer is king" is not something in France, so you want to be polite with everyone.
• 0xbadcafebee 3y ago
  I remember being at a bar in the 18th, and asking for "L'Eau". "Quoi?" "L'eau sil vous plait?" ..... long pause ..... I motion to picking up a glass and drinking it ..... "Ahhhh! DE L'eau!" I was like.... Dude... come the fuck on.
  • OHfsfuiohsef 3y ago
    Sounds like you're asking to talk to a girl named Lola, diminutive Lo. And the guy is like wondering if he remembers someone at the bar with that name or if he misheard you. But after he sees your hand gestuals, the meaning of your needs becomes clear. French and Italians are familiar with waiving hands and making facial expressions to accompany their words, so keep doing it, and be patient until your language skills improve. My first trips in Britain as a teenager, no one could understand me asking where the bathroom is (French is my mother tongue). Now that's not a fun one to use gestuals for. In time I got to learn about the John, loo. But hey, it's the fun about traveling in foreign land!
  • bongodongobob 3y ago
    You might be overthinking a friendly ribbing. I had a similar interaction in Italy and he was just trying to help and I did find it helpful.
  • Leherenn 3y ago
    Well, maybe he was an asshole, but in his defence articles are much less optional in French than in English, thus you don't expect it standalone. It basically becomes one word in your consciousness. A bit like if someone asks you for "ater". And when you finally understand, you feel really stupid, because yes ultimately it was just missing a useless article, but it just didn't click.
• kashunstva 3y ago
  > It is because it actually is very hard to understand broken French. Is there any evidence that French has some unique qualities that render it unusually difficult to understand when not spoken by a someone fluent in the language? I’m reasonably competent in French and if there is such a feature, I don’t see it.
  • esperent 3y ago
    No, I don't think so. In my experience of traveling around and trying to speak various languages in a broken fashion, the biggest difficulty is the native's receptivity to trying to understand you. The second biggest difficulty is ease of basic pronunciations, and this does vary a lot between languages. For example, currently I'm in Vietnam, and local people do not try to understand foreigners who speak Vietnamese at all. By locals, I mean people I meet around during the day like shopkeepers and service people rather than my friends. The pronunciation is also extremely difficult because of the tones and the very large difference in regional accents. It's frustrating and I have given up trying to learn the language because of this. I would accept that France is slightly harder to pronounce than English but as a beginner/intermediate French speaker I don't personally believe it. However, I definitely agree that people in France - especially Paris - are not receptive to foreigners speaking French at all. They don't support you, and you do feel looked down on for speaking badly (in comparison to Vietnam where you will never feel looked down on, you'll just receive looks of confusion). Again, I don't mean friends that you make. I mean the general French populace that you meet while going about your daily business, in shops, restaurants, and so on. Spain, Italy, Greece are similar to France in that they are condescending towards non-native speakers. Mainland Greece was the worst for me. Meanwhile I would say that Portugal, Indonesia, Germany, and many English speaking countries (at least in cities) are quite helpful and friendly towards non-native speakers. Of course, I only have my own limited experience to go on so I may be wrong.
    • dnh44 3y ago
      >Spain, Italy, Greece are similar to France in that they are condescending towards non-native speakers. I've spent quite a lot of time in Spain and I've never felt that but it's possible that I just didn't notice. The same in Italy although I've only spent 3 or 4 weeks there in total. However it has never occurred to me to think of Paris as unfriendly either which seems to contradict the experience of most other people, so maybe I'm just oblivious to that sort of thing.
• porknubbins 3y ago
  I have noticed that advanced mono lingual speakers (ie with higher education or some experience analyzing language) are aware of a huge amount of nuance and meaning in their language encoded in small inflections or grammar. They are thus not always good at narrowing down to the simple thing the accented foreigner is trying to say. It seems to require some 2nd language learning experience to realize “the 2nd language speaker is probably not advanced enough to know rare idiom X, therefore he probably means much more common idiom Y but has the grammar off.”
  • imbnwa 3y ago
    This reminds me of the early years of Mixed Martial Arts where you had lots of Brazilian second language speakers interacting with guys with journalism degrees in MMA journalism at the time who weren’t aware how confusing they sounded using American sports idiom after American sports idiom and the Brazilians would just do their best trying to make sense of what they’re being asked
• hackernewds 3y ago
  > French people alvways get criticized for not understanding foreigners' broken French. Travel most other countries, and you will notice that's not why French people get criticized by foreigners that experience the treatment.
• watwut 3y ago
  Honestly, I had good experiences with talking French in France. And it was by no means perfect. My working assumption is that beyond meme, people have much worst pronunciation and grammer then they think.
• jjav 3y ago
  > French people always get criticized for not understanding foreigners' broken French. It is not out of malice. It is because it actually is very hard to understand broken French. Here's an anecdote that suggests it is nothing but malice in Paris. My partner's mother is from France (not Paris) and extremely French. Has worked decades as a professor of French language. You'll have a hard time finding someone more proper in strict French language than her. And yet, in Paris she is mocked for "not speaking French" and they pretend to not understand her even though her French is as perfect as it gets. It's just malice, if you're not a local.
  • jackjeff 3y ago
    I’d be curious to know where she is from. I’m from Southern France but I have lived in Paris for a few years. I didn’t have a strong accent that would require subtitles on French TV like some people do, but I did have an accent. Nobody would mistake me for a local. I think people over there are generally condescending and don’t care about you. I don’t think the accent is the issue. If not that they would find something else to complain about. I was occasionally mocked for my accent but nothing that a stare and raising of my voice would not fix. Maybe staff is more likely to mess with a woman? Anyway. Almost nobody is a local in Paris. People from all over France come there. They erase their accent and all pretend to be Parisians after a few years. Then they age and go back home to retire or raise a family in an affordable place. These days I travel with my wife and switch from perfect English to perfect French and I get a bit of shock from the staff when this occurs. Nobody complains about my accent anymore, relieved they won’t have to deal with English for once. I must have a fairly weird and impossible to geographically locate accent nowadays after years of living abroad and speaking to expats. I’m no longer sounding like the caricature of the peasant from Southern France. Also my wife is a lot more friendly than me and generally would befriend staff members that can speak good English (foreigners or students) so I guess that helps.
    • jjav 3y ago
      > I’d be curious to know where she is from. Normandy area.
• Doxin 3y ago
  > French people always get criticized for not understanding foreigners' broken French. It is not out of malice. Plenty of people seem to have anecdotes that are hard to explain in any way other than malice. I have one of my own: I was out camping with the family in france, I don't remember where exactly. As is tradition we managed to forget to bring the can opener. Cue my dad in the campstore with a can trying to get the shop keeper to sell us a can opener. How can you possibly need more than someone miming a can opener with a can saying "ouvrir" to get what he was trying to communicate? Never mind that his french was plenty fluid enough to hold a conversation with plenty of other french people. I'm sure most french people are perfectly nice and do their best to understand foreigners. But -- at least the last time I was over there -- there are also more than enough french people who just straight up refuse to understand foreigners to leave a bitter taste in peoples mouth.
• eloisant 3y ago
  The first time I went to US, I was pretty confident in my English but natives didn't understand me. I could repeat the same, grammatically correct sentence 3 times and they still wouldn't get it. Then I realized that in English (especially American English) you have to accentuate the right syllabus or they won't understand you. Say you're going to "mounTAIN view" instead of "MOUNtain view" and they have no idea what place you're talking about.
  • mathieuh 3y ago
    That's with every dialect of English. English has phonemic stress, i.e. the way you stress a word can change its meaning or make it unrecognisable unless you're speaking to an English-speaker familiar with people who speak English coloured by whatever your native language is. This is a particular problem for French-speakers, since French doesn't have phonemic stress. British and Irish people will probably understand French-accented English better than Americans because of greater exposure to French.
  • kubanczyk 3y ago
    True, but aren't you primarily talking here about vowel length? As a language feature it's more pronounced than accent/stress. /ˈmaʊntɪn/ MOUNtain /mɒn'taɪn/ mounTAIN (?) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vowel_length https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vowel_length
  • UncleSlacky 3y ago
    Reminds me of foreigners asking for "water" in the US at restaurants, having to pronouce it "wadder" in order to be understood.
    • rprospero 3y ago
      I remember a grad student who went through a similar incident. While I appreciated his frustration, I also understand the anxiety of the poor server trying to remember how to mix a Woahtuh before my colleague decided to enunciate the coda.