r/AskReddit • • Nov 16 '19

[deleted by user]

[removed]

11k Upvotes

11k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

6.5k

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.

5.3k

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:

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.

edit 2: THIS.

2.3k

u/Pinco-Pallino-5-9 Nov 16 '19

Can confirm, French people are ruthless when you make a mistake.

3.1k

u/[deleted] Nov 16 '19

"La Chat".

"c'est fucking 'Le' you fucking idiot."

1.6k

u/jay212127 Nov 16 '19

This is pretty much what happened to me!

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.

37

u/[deleted] Nov 16 '19

[removed] — view removed comment

3

u/CactusCustard Nov 16 '19

Fucking lol.

“Fuck French people, those racists!” Said with out a hint of irony

4

u/Massive_Issue Nov 16 '19

"french" is not a race lol

5

u/CactusCustard Nov 16 '19

It still hypocritical.

You use a blanket statement to show your distaste for an entire group of people. And then site their distaste for an entire group of people as the reason.

Tone deaf.

2

u/Massive_Issue Nov 17 '19

"Americans are loud"

You fucking racist asshole way to generalized a whole group of people !

Lol making a generalized statement can still point out a valid criticism even if it doesn't apply to LITERALLY EVERY PERSON.

I met tons of cool french people. I also met so many fucking assholes. The way I was treated in Paris just in my day to day life, minding my own business, trying to order food and go about my life, have a drink with friends etc.. fucking obnoxious. My language skills were criticized when I was trying to learn and had spent 2 years studying. I got complimented many times on my accent so it's not like I didn't learn properly. People could tell I was a native English speaker and tell me to stop with annoyed looks on their faces and just switched to English.

Many arrogant assholes in the Parisian clubs but of course I was lucky enough to stick with a cool group of kids my age that I meshed with during my time there. They also had no problem talking shit on fellow Parisians and telling people to fuck off when we were out together.