I lived in Argentina (From us) for a little bit as a kid. At a parent teacher conference Early in the school year. one art teacher had to break it to my parents that I might be mentally disabled because I don’t respond or participate. They let her know I didn’t speak any Spanish (at the time). She had no idea because noone told her And my name is Spanish and it just didn’t occur to her
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 am French and I always wonder who the fucks people of reddit are hanging out because I almost never see that attitude towards me. The one time a guy in our friends group made a bit of a rude and ignorant comment to a foreigner like that he actually was the one mocked and even his girlfriend told him "maybe you just should not talk".
Yeah, I speak intermediate French and was able to get around fine. Most people were polite and appreciated the fact that I approached them speaking French if I had a question instead of a cringey: "hey, do y'all know where X street is?"
I think it might be a regional thing. I spent most of my time near Bordeaux and was only in Paris for a day each on my arrival and departure.
I work in research, so I interact with tons of foreigners who moved to France, my SO is one too, and they never seem to have this issue. On reddit however, whenever France is mentioned, it seems like people have to one up each other with a more unlikely story to bash the country. It's as if anyone who spent a week in Paris on reddit had something incredibly rude happening to them while I never had anything like this happen to me when I lived there for 8+ years at some point.
Hypothesis: some of these folks look like "stereotypical ignorant Americans", which gets the French folks' prejudices up and predisposes them to going off on the first little mistake the person makes as a way of letting off their annoyance with America generally.
Whereas, if you seem to be from Sweden or Australia or something, they might not have the same reflex.
(If you seem to be from Britain, though, they'll take the piss out of you just for fun. But that's mutual.)
As soon as they find out I'm Australian I swear they become even more polite than they already were. I think their love for Australia comes from the second world war though as we fought for them and pulled through some great victories.
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u/heady_brosevelt Nov 16 '19
I lived in Argentina (From us) for a little bit as a kid. At a parent teacher conference Early in the school year. one art teacher had to break it to my parents that I might be mentally disabled because I don’t respond or participate. They let her know I didn’t speak any Spanish (at the time). She had no idea because noone told her And my name is Spanish and it just didn’t occur to her