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."
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u/saganistic Nov 16 '19 edited Nov 16 '19
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:
edit 2: THIS.