I can’t understand why the French are so sensitive about everyone - especially tourists from other countries - speaking French all the time !! Does it not dawn on these simple shits that FOREIGN tourists are likely not going to be fluent in French ? Do they just not want any tourism in France ?
I lived in France as a kid for three years and remember clearly their institutionalized shit attitude about the language and their attitudes of superiority. This is common there - it is not an aberration.
Lived in Mexico for 11 years and the experience was the opposite. Even if your attempts to use Spanish are unintelligible, they will bend over backwards to try to understand and practice their minimal public school English with you. And, they’ll smile while they do it !
It’s just one way of showing arrogance towards other nationals and the French are definitely not unique in this respect. The a-holeness is the same with the Japanese back in the 80s and 90s towards other countries, especially the US. Show me a Japanese executive today who can say flat out that American workers are fat and lazy. Same with Singaporeans today who complain that the overhead trams in other countries are dilapidated compared with those back home.
As to why the French resort to a deliberate language barrier, I can only guess that they believe learning French while in France makes a lot more sense than the French having to learn a different language every minute.
You’ll probably get the same attitude here if you at least try and talk (horribly mangled) French - we love it, the funnier the accent the better. I mean, we’ll still gently give you shit on general principle, but it’s just the nature of the game :D.
We only give *real *shit to people who won’t even make the effort to learn three words, just speak English at people and when that fails bark English and throw some curse words or insults in there (of course we understand them. In 40 languages). Far as I can tell it’s because they’re depriving us of an opportunity to be gracious in return and, instead of gratefully agreeing to our offer to move the conversation to English, demand it from the get go. Which inherently and almost unconsciously puts us in a fuck you mood.
Finally, no, we don’t smile overly much. We think smiling all the time makes you look like an imbécile heureux. We reserve ours for people we genuinely like, or people we’re being paid to like. That’s just our way shrug.
In China they don’t say “thank you” unless you did them a real solid, for the same reason : they figure saying it all the time dilutes the value. So they go abroad, don’t say thank you to the waiter or to the person holding the door, and people think they’re just rude. They’re not, they just have a different operating system installed.
Is this beacuse of fear from bigotry (perhaps from Islamic population), economic reasons or some other reasons?
btw. I believe it was France that was the only country that shared nuclear technology with Israel , allowing the latter to build the Bomb. At first, at least.
The French language going back several centuries was the sucessor of Latin as the Lingua Franca of diplompacy, philosophy, and finally science up until roughly the defeat of Napoleon though still it was the language of diplomacy until fairly recently.
The French are understanably proud of their cultural and scientific heritage, the only criticism is their lack of teaching a second language, fluently.
But most of us anglophones can’t complain on that score!
That’s evolving though - my generation (born in the 80s) already had to pick between learning English, Spanish, German or Russian in high school, mandatory (plus a secondary, less fluent pick). These days, from what I understand it’s pretty much just English as first choice, with a secondary pick. And more mandatory English in college.
So the population really is kind of strictly divided : old guys (50 and above) may or may not know English at all, it really depends on their careers, some had to learn for their jobs, most never did because it wasn’t important to back then - in fact my Grandma was adamant that I learn German because it was where all the money supposedly was. Thankfully my parents thought otherwise :p.
Guys my age (30 ish) probably know enough English to get by, regardless of trade - but like any language, it gets rusty quick if they don’t use it on a regular basis.
Younger kids got mandatory learning AND the interwebs - they know English all right :).
That’s very interesting!
Here in Ireland in 1994 when I did my Leaving Cert. (le bac) we had to do exams in both English and Irish plus a foreign language to qualify for a Uni. place and the only choice in my school was Latin or French. I really learned to love learn French in those two years!
My ability to speak it is crap due to rustiness, but even now I can understand most of the news programmes on TV5.
I just wish I could speak and write French as well as you do English Kobal2!
Antisemitic incidents are the main stated reason, but the French population is very disgruntled about politics (abysmal levels of satisfaction for politicians on both sides) and pessimistic about economic perspectives at the moment, so I would assume both.
Moving to Israel is quite hassle-free (there are people there you share something with, you get government support as a newcomer, even citizenship) as long as you aren’t of military age, so it easily beats emigrating to most other countries even if you aren’t strongly motivated to live in Israel per se.
The rate of return from Israel is rather high too, though. Not everybody fits in.
No secrets - my parents had me take private lessons from 6 to 16, two hours a week. I resented it a lot at the time because nobody else I knew had to go and do that, but now I’m not so sure any more :).
Because they have a right to be. They’re French. It has been French official policy since the 17th Century, and French cultural policy for much longer, that all things French should be fine. Just as it has been British/English official/cultural policy, for at least as long, that all things British/English should be plain and crude, the which applies to all British/English-derived cultures, for our sins, for our sins, for our most grievous sins.
Back in the day I wanted to learn Russian for the same reason - I can’t exactly explain why or how, but I’ve always found the sonorities very pleasing and “right”. Like, a Russian love song *sounds *like schmooze to me, a rabid Russian nationalist spouting fascist shit sounds like war, a Russian union leader makes your proletarian worker heart thump and so on. But, nope, “had to” get into German as a token Grandma-pleasing gesture :). Also stupid Latin. And now the prospect of wading into yet another language with cases, tenses and declensions scares me right off :o.
So I’m going with Chinese these days. Almost no grammar to speak of, where do I sign up ?
You know, if you’re going to be snooty, it behooves you to get the facts right. Chinese has just as much grammar as German, Finnish, and any other language actually used as a mother tongue; it simply puts it in a different place compared to those other languages.
Every language has just as much grammar as every other. If they didn’t, we’d have to invent more grammar to make it usable.
I’m just saying, constructing a Chinese sentence is a much simpler and intuitive experience for me than foraying into the treacherous maze that was German, nǐ dǒng ma ? shrug.
Europeans seem to find more analytic languages easier to deal with than the most inflected languages, but, ultimately, languages where the role of a word in the sentence is conveyed by word order are just as complex as languages where that information is conveyed by an inflectional system with conjugations and declensions. The same information is there, because that’s the information humans need to convey, and languages are human tools.
It just grates on me when someone says a language has no grammar. It’s like imagining a planet with no land, liquid, ice, or atmosphere: What exactly is there for you to call a planet? A list of words with no way to arrange them into sentences isn’t a language. If you can make sentences, you have grammar. By definition. It’s just that one kind of grammar fits in your head better than the other.
