No, it's a French thing. They're rather infamous for making your life difficult if you don't speak fluent French. Anywhere else in Europe people would at least make an effort.
In my experience as a tourist, you can skip the fluent part.
But the quantity of smiles goes up 300% when you talk to them in bad French with finger pointing as opposed to fluent English, even in tourist trap areas.
Maybe slightly better service too.
Edit: hey HN, can we have the option to post one anonymous coward comment every couple days from our regular accounts? We're going to run out of throwawayNNNNNN ids sooner or later.
That's totally a cliche.
Everywhere in the world you can meet people that :
1. Only speak their native language.
2. Speak several languages but not yours.
3. Speak your language but are assholes.
4. Speak your language but are afraid of talking because they are afraid of sounding ridiculous.
5. Are very happy to speak your language.
6. Hate your country for absurd reasons.
7. Love your country for absurd reasons.
Nowadays young frenchs learn english by overexposition to the language through various medias (school is of no help) and in the past, even if english was taught at school, I think the majority of them didn't learn it properly beyond "my taylor is rich", "The cat is happy" and "I love you".
I didn't "learn" english and it is a mystery why I can express myself and understand others in this language, I guess I have been overexposed to the language when I was young.
That said, I worked in museums at a time in my life and was actually surprised by the huge amount of people travelling in the world with no knowledge of the language of the country they are in, expecting everybody to be able to talk their language like if it was universal, be them italians, frenchs, americans, chinese or whatever.
Quand vous voyagez chez nous, vous vous rendriez service en faisant un premier pas en français. C'est une marque de respect que nous apprécions beaucoup, même si la suite de l'échange se fait en anglais.
That’s an unhelpful take, if you expect everyone to be fluent in the language of the country they’re traveling to.
Another note: I live in Cambodia, where many French people live, and nearly none of them speak the local language, and a very decent amount of them don’t even speak English. Worse yet, the older generation is still hung up in the idea that it’s better for the locals to learn French than English or Chinese.
This is really a very French thing, and you don’t see the same behavior in eg Germany or Italy.
I'm from Poland, but my grandma was living in Germany (Essen). When I was (rarely, she was visiting Poland much more often) visiting her I definitely experienced similar behaviour from Germans.
My German is very poor, I used to somewhat understand what was spoken to me (if simple language was used), and to speak is short, basic sentences with shortage of vocabulary. This is just to provide some context - I never actually tried to learn German.
So I was trying to use English as often as possible. A lot of people - and I mean persons like clerks, salespersons, not random passers-by - either straight-up ignored me, or issuing comments like "Du solltest Sprachen lernen".
On the other hand, I never had similar experience when I was speaking broken French in France (or Marocco).
Please note that I don't want to bash Germans or to defend French. But it all depends on who you encounter - but these encounters might on some level shape your opinion on the whole nation no matter of you want it or not
Since I'm also from the region and familiar with local issues: are you sure this was not the good old anti-immigrant hostility? Germany has (or had) a lot of immigration from Poland and some locals could think you're an immigrant who refuses to learn the language. In my country I sometimes see similar behavior targeted specifically at Ukrainian speakers.
FWIW, I only ever experienced the discussed issue (locals who clearly understand English but refuse to acknowledge me or respond in their language) in France. I really suspect it's specific to french speakers. They uniquely feel that their language was lingua franca and lost the status to English.
Could also be anti-immigration sentiment, because I'm from the US, but I traveled to Germany a few years before the pandemic and while there was only ever one German person whom ever gave me crap about English, there was indeed one and it was a very inconvenient person to take such a harsh stance on. It was in a little airport (which, if it matters, was very close to france) that we were taking to leave Germany and head down toward Italy. The person looking over the bins for carryons was herding people through and she pointed at me and said something I didn't understand in German. So I guessed and pointed at a thing or two, and when she kept saying "no", I finally gave the ol' "es tut mir leid, mein Deutsch ist schlecht. Sprechen sie englisch?", to which she replied slowly and aggressively: "noooo. sprichst du deutsch?"
Which... is certainly understandable! I'm sure she sees a lot of tourism and tourists. But for a neurotic person, being singled out as someone holding up the line by someone who is ostensibly there to help things move faster, because I didn't know a language that I expressly said I didn't know and apologized for, was quite jarring. Up until that point, every single person I met with talked to me like I had a second head that they were generally aware of but didn't care about while they tried to be as polite as possible about not bringing it up. It was a kind of clipped politeness that I have been told is just "german". Nobody cares to be friendly, everyone just wants to exchange only the information needed and, while they do so, they would be as happy and pleasant as a person could be. But as soon as the information had been exchanged, they were right back to bewildered disinterest ("why are you still talking to me? we've finished.", while smiling and nodding).
Anyway, whatever it was that she was trying to tell me, the message never got through. When I answered "no" to her question, she just moved me on through. So maybe she was trying to be polite and I showed my ass or something. Or maybe she was just trying to make a joke and then moved past it when there was no way to make me get it. Whatever the case, I left with the distinct feeling that the author described about that French street. "some people here, sometimes, are going to be very uncharitable about your lack of cultural integration. beware of that." Which, on the one hand is pretty obvious; people are just people all over. But on the other hand, it's probably something most cultures would aspire to minimize.
Je ne conçois même pas en quoi cela serait une marque d'irrespect que de ne pas le faire ?
Quand je peux aider quelqu'un qui échoue péniblement à trouver des interlocuteurs et qui ne parle pas français, je suis ravi de le faire et je ne m'en sens pas insulté par ailleurs.
L'absence de marque de respect ne constitue pas en soi un irrespect, ce n'est pas une variable booléenne. En revanche cette simple marque de respect change toutes les dispositions de votre interlocuteur, quel que soit le pays et la langue d'ailleurs. Visiblement vous avez eu la chance de ne jamais tomber sur des touristes balourds voir suffisant, tant mieux pour vous. Pourtant ils existent et peuvent être une plaie (oui, les français à l'étranger aussi peuvent l'être). C'est heureusement une minorité, tout comme les français qui refuseraient de parler anglais "par principe".
Je ne conçois non plus comment me parler en français devrait m'amadouer.
Je ne me sens ni respecté ni bafoué par avance, quelque soit la langue dans laquelle on s'adresse à moi.
Qu'un touriste soit stupide, balourd ou suffisant, sa capacité à parler français ne lui sera d'aucun secours s'il souhaite échapper au jugement que je lui imprime.
Vous savez, j'essaie principalement de comprendre qu'est ce qui peut faire exister le cliché sus-mentionné "les français font exprès de ne pas parler votre langue".
Quand je lis "Vous devriez parler français, nous apprécions cela comme une marque de respect" j'ai honte !
On appelle ça la déférence. C'est ce qui met un peu d'huile dans les rapports humains. Avoir honte de ça en dit très long sur l'époque malheureusement.
Yeah, with this line the author completely lost me. What did he expect them to do? Does he think of himself as steadfastly committed to not speaking Japanese, Bantu, Hindi, and Algonquin?
(I realize it was (hopefully) meant in jest-ish, but there are better ways to make the point.)
This might be a British humoUr thing - as a local it read very much as a self-deprecating jab at our own English-centric travelling. Taken literally obviously it would be offensive, but it's not meant that way. I note that the author lives in Edinburgh, a place which has a reputation for quite dry, understated and self-deprecating style to start with - understandably, as the only way to stand the hordes clogging the Mile and other picturesque spots.
He expected them to speak the barest minimum of English, so speakers of Japanese, Bantu, Hindi, and Algonquin do not have to learn more than one foreign language when vacationing abroad.
Honestly, I myself learn one emergency phrase in the native language, "I am sorry, please repeat this as if I have a learning disability". Upon hearing this my vis-a-vis would either actually switch to a slow and dumbed-down register of their native language or realize they won't lose face by speaking bad English to me.
>He expected them to speak the barest minimum of English, so speakers of Japanese, Bantu, Hindi, and Algonquin do not have to learn more than one foreign language when vacationing abroad.
Why are speakers of Japanese, Banty, Hindi and Algonquin vacationing abroad a problem of locals who just want to live their own life?... Most people do learn English for one reason or another, but "entertaining tourists" is not one of them.