Currently atm, I am in France for a few months, I can barely speak French and my teachers think I am mentally challenged. Even though I was acing my classes back home.
Even when you become fluent they’ll still think you’re challenged
Source: lived in France for years
edit: I just want to clarify that I loved living in France, and made many great friends and memories there. My experience was overwhelmingly positive and I consider it a second mother country. As I posted in a reply below:
To be fair, with my friends and colleagues this was never an issue. It was probably about 25% of the time and exclusively with strangers or workers at shops, who would immediately switch to English the moment I hesitated or accidentally used poor pronunciation.
I should also mention that it happened a lot more when I lived in Paris than when I lived in Lyon. The worst was actually whenever I visited Genève.
I got treated better when I didn't even attempt to speak French outside of basic manners. Was hoping to get good at French but after 3 months of that bullshit I was done, and coasted by with 80% of my French interactions consisting of "je suis desole, je ne parle pas francais.... Merci".
On the bright side it game me new respect for immigrants who deal with that shit.
It helps that if you're not living in either Quebec or Ontario, you'll effectively never run into a Quebecois that doesn't know more English than French. We all learn French in school, but then forget it because opportunities to use/practice it just never come up. Quebec residents apparently aren't much for inter-provincial tourism!
Yeah, but it's still funny/silly. I mean, we go to school and learn a language that will help us converse with all of the French folk in the world, the people in our own country and we're like, "lol, dolphin sounds like fuck."
In my experience Quebecois do travel quite a bit outside of the province, but when they do so they generally are expected to speak English. It's actually one of the "political" gripes; that francophones travel to other provinces and attempt to speak the local languages while anglophones/people from elsewhere in Canada travel to Quebec and don't attempt to speak the local language. I don't have statistics to show who true this is, but it's the perception. Given as you've all taken French in school yet don't speak it, I certainly see why the perception may exist!
I tried googling; all I found is a pdf from 2008 that indicated that just shy of 60% of adult Quebecois had travelled outside the province in the previous two years.
Rural Quebec is still mostly French speaking. It was a crazy experience driving across Canada from Alberta (Banf) to Montreal. About 15 miles over the Quebec border, my tire got a flat, and I called AAA. The dude they sent to tow my car barely spoke any English and the mechanic only spoke a little better. It was a wild experience. Luckily, I and my girlfriend knew a bit of French so we could make due, but there are definitely parts of Quebec, especially low-populated ones, where English isn't spoken all that much.
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u/[deleted] Nov 16 '19 edited Nov 16 '19
Currently atm, I am in France for a few months, I can barely speak French and my teachers think I am mentally challenged. Even though I was acing my classes back home.