The French do the same with all other languages, so fair game.
Germany’s 2nd most spoken language is English, by 32% of the population.
Germany’s 3rd most spoken language is French, by 9% of the population.
France’s 2nd most spoken language is English, by 24% of the population.
France’s 3rd most spoken language is Spanish, by 9% of the population.
UK’s 2nd most spoken language is French, by 16% of the population.
UK’s 3rd most spoken language is German, by 5% of the population.
Source: https://languageknowledge.eu/
While you could say that France is a bit behind the curve in comparison with most other Northern European countries, native English speakers are far worse at learning any other language. I’m not even French, but the circle-jerk English speaking communities have about French people sometimes gets pretty embarrassing.
The point is precisely that they are very capable and do speak the language, but they sometimes refuse to.
And yes, it’s also a meme.
Depends. They also like to watch you to awkwardly stammer through your hardly recognizable French sentence just to reply in perfect English (or even your mother tongue in border regions).
My favourite is when they ignore you when you speak English (which isn’t even your native language either, just the most likely language to be understood by both parties), then when you speak bad French, they reply on even worse English. Bonus points for those that do it to tourists in France and as tourists in other counties (both have happened to me but ofc I can’t know if the same person would do both).
One time when my mom visited France, she asked a shop’s clerk for directions. She tried French but kind of gave up and used some English words scattered throughout her sentence for words she didn’t know. The clerk acted annoyed and pretended not to understand, so my mom tried to use only her broken French. The clerk responded very quickly in French.
My mom then said, in English, “I’m sorry, I didn’t get that, French is such a beautiful language but I’m having a hard time learning it”. The clerk then completely 180’ed her attitude, acted all happy and switched to perfect, fluent English, with almost no French accent.
That situation taught me that some French people apparently just want you to suck the metaphorical dick of their culture before they choose to be nice to you lol.
Nobody likes the fact that English tourists think they just can skip trying to learn a language when they visit another country. That being said, your mom was clearly trying so yeah I would have cut her some slack right away.
If I had to learn the language of every country I ever visited I would have never had time to visit those countries.
You can definitely skip learning the local language these days if you’re just a short-term tourist. Translate anything written with OCR, and for most other things just smile, point, fingers for numbers, and again machine translation is totally fine for simple things.
If you actually assume people can speak English though, that’s not cool.
I’m French and foreign languages are one of my hobbies. I’m proficient in English and Spanish. I can at a lower level speak some Russian, German, Czech, and Italian.
Imho the fault lies in our education system which puts a heavy accent on STEM studies and tends to treat anything outside of that as lesser subjects.
Also from anecdotal evidence the younger generations are quite better than the older ones.
All those people online with their anecdotes agreeing with what you wrote, yet my experience has been the complete opposite. I think the problem is Americans being insufferable assholes, and the French not letting that fly as much as other countries.
