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[–] 193 points 3 months ago (39 children)

The French don't mind, cause they don't understand any language except French.

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  • [–] 52 points 3 months ago (5 children)

    Ils le comprennent parfaitement mais ils refusent de le parler.

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  • [–] 80 points 3 months ago (12 children)

    the impression I get is that they're pretending not to understand, but they do, they just don't give a flying fuck what other people think of them because everyone keeps buying their cheese, wine, and fashion so they're busy counting money, getting laid, and smoking like chimneys lol

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  • [–] 32 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    Can confirm, their cheese if fucking awesome

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  • [–] 0 points 3 months ago* (4 children)

    Historically they think, or at least seem to think, learning English is beneath them. In fact doing anything not French is beneath them. Then they act like wankers and that's why everyone hates them.

    English is the dominate language and the Chinese even accepted it before the French. At this point the youth have sort of given up and end up consuming a lot of media and internet in English so it's way better. Also the lingua franca of Europe is English so they got to learn it just to speak to everyone else, but they don't really and as such have probably the worst english is western Europe and even most of Europe in general.

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  • [+] 1 point 3 months ago (3 children)
  • [–] 17 points 3 months ago (12 children)

    This is an outdated stereotype. I'd be willing to bet more French speak a second language than Americans.

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  • [–] 10 points 3 months ago (4 children)

    But not than Belgians, Dutch, polish or Germans, which are the most frequent comparisons.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    Why would the Dutch/Polish/Germans speak more languages?

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  • [–] 5 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    Idk about the Polish and Germans personally, but for the Netherlands at least it's a relatively small country with a limited amount of entertainment made there, so a ton of media is imported and subtitled. Since a lot of it comes from the US and UK, and most of it is subtitled (for the most part only kids' shows are dubbed over), the majority of people speak or at least understand English. According to Wikipedia, it has been estimated that as much as 90% to 97% of the population is proficient in English.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 months ago

    Also English, French and German are part of you high school curriculum next to Dutch so at least you get a basic understanding of 3 other languages, of the 3 English is the one that sticks the most because of the aforementioned media that gets imported.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 months ago

    Belgium alone has 3 official languages: French, Dutch and a German speaking part.

    The French part refuses to learn any of the other official languages, even in school. They don't see the need.

    While the other parts are a lot more open to other languages. You will be hard pressed to find someone in Flanders that doesn't speak French on top of their Dutch.

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  • [–] 5 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    lol not in absolute numbers terms, no way. The US has 5x the population, and there are tons of immigrants that speak multiple languages. So regardless of how stupid native-born citizens are, there are still many bilingual+ people.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago* (1 child)

    Absolute numbers? what kind of intentionality disingenuous comparison is that? We have like 4x their population.

    Try visiting France. Almost everyone in the major cities speaks English to a competent degree. Only like a quarter of Americans speak Spanish equivalently. I mean not even all Latin people speak Spanish in the US.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    I've been in France for two days and have already met 2 young people who didn't speak more than high school English. Oh and I'm a tourist, so they were working a job where they have to interact with foreigners regularly...

    Now of course anecdote isn't statistics, and my French is certainly no better, but compared to other European countries their English level is... notable.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago* (1 child)

    Wow two whole young people. So almost everyone else spoke English right? Don't lie to me because I've been there many times and I know they do.

    It's crazy how Americans get defensive about the dumbest shit.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago

    Yes, almost everyone spoke English, I never lied about that. Just compared to other European countries I've been, 2 is still notable. In many countries it'd be hard to find a single young person who didn't speak English even if you were trying to find them for 2 days.

    I'd know because I live in a European country, I'm not American.

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  • [–] 12 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    They don't even understand French from other countries.

    Source : Je suis Canadien français mais je parle anglais quand je vais en France. C'est beaucoup moins chiant.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    Ce n'est effectivement pas qu'une question d'accent. Ils utilisent des mots différents pour désigner certaines choses. Dites-vous aussi « quatre-vingt-dix-neuf » au lieu de « nonante-neuf » ?

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago

    Yeah, I'm from New Jersey but took French in middle and high school, and eventually, at 19 say let's do this thing, and I go to Montreal, and imagine my surprise when I have no idea what the fuck they're saying. And I make friends with a couple on a cruise from Gatineau, and my god, it's even harder to understand. I was failed by my education!

    And when I go to Paris and speak French they're like "Okay you can stop," which to me means good enough! The New Jersey accent is quite unlike the French accent, it seems.

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  • [–] 135 points 3 months ago (5 children)
  • [–] 16 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    This, and without a hint of irony.

    France, you're a cunt and I love you.

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  • [–] 9 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 child)

    They're cunts but they're our cunts.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago

    Exactly! We may all hate each other on some level, but we are still sistren and brethren of europe (russia you dont count fuck off, but we can gladlely accept kasachstan as honorary european in its place instead). Hit on one of us and we are a united front!...atleast the people...politics...ugh lets not start that...

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  • [–] 110 points 3 months ago (9 children)

    Hating the French is a MI6 psyop to direct hate away from the Bri*ish

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  • [–] 0 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    Unpopular opinion but the British aren't even that bad. They are only hated so much because they have been really good at a lot of things and drinking too much. The foundation most of the world is based on is British and it's easy to miss.

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  • [–] 27 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    I love Europe. It's the only place where a bus driver from country A can get into a heated argument with a random guy from country B in two completely different languages. After both have gone on for a bit and not understood a word of what the other one was saying, they have reached a point of agreement, can wish each other a good day and carry on.

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  • [–] 26 points 3 months ago (15 children)

    In overwatch EU servers (maybe in other similar games too), in my experience, in terms of pure toxicity hurled at you, having a french accent in comms manages to be even worse than having a female voice. Couldn't help but smile this one time someone told me they wouldn't be using the team comms because they were french. Amazing.

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  • [–] 8 points 3 months ago* (5 children)

    I love it. Never understood the hate for the French. I sometimes mock their accent out of admiration (same with Dutch). It sounds so nice to me. Once came across a woman who spoke in a French accent in Overwatch, rolled her R's forever and it sounded so attractive.

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  • [–] 7 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    Despite some very famous recent losses, France historically tended to go to war with and win against just about everyone on the continent, as such everyone got a bit salty about it. These days its just more of a meme.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago

    Well, they conquered Spain by turning against them, allies up to that point, and having their army inside the country already. "The war can be said to have started when the French and Spanish armies invaded and occupied Portugal in 1807 by transiting through Spain, but it escalated in 1808 after Napoleonic France occupied Spain, which had been its ally."

    The the Spaniards handed Napoleon his ass on a platter, coining the word guerrilla.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago

    Never understood the hate for the French.

    Just look up their colonial past. Before you think "That's old stuff now", some places still suffer from French colonialism today

    One of the founding principles of the (CFA, African Financial Community) was that colonies had to keep 50 percent of their foreign currency reserves in the French Treasury, plus an additional 20 percent for financial liabilities. Thus, member states only retained 30 percent of reserves within their borders.

    The monetary zone limits industrialization and economic development and discourages trade among member states

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  • [–] 7 points 3 months ago (8 children)

    The French are the saltiest fuckers on the European OW servers. If they want to really insult you they switch to French, fucking cowards.

    Which is honestly absolutely hilarious

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  • [–] 10 points 3 months ago* (5 children)

    It's because insults in French are much better. Insulting in French is more cathartic.

    I thought everybody knew that since 2003

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  • [–] 23 points 3 months ago

    I actually quite like the french nowadays....coming from a dutchie

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  • [–] 30 points 3 months ago

    There's only two things I hate in this world. People who are intolerant of other people's cultures and the DutchFrench.

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  • [–] 14 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    As a french girl, I hate France too

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  • [–] 13 points 3 months ago (5 children)

    People love to hate the french but I find it pretty unearned.

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  • [–] -3 points 3 months ago (4 children)

    They put up the white flag before any argument could be made.

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  • [–] 10 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    American commenter detected, how dare you fuck with France without even being European. And if you are European, how dare you using the American punchline when we have our own for France.

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  • [–] 12 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    The painful 'Murican obsession with identifying as a member of a culture they have a tenuous link to, in an attempt to be interesting, is genuinely cringeworthy

    Your great grandfather was Scottish, French, Irish, Italian etc.

    Not you

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    It's obviously cringe, but I don't think it's some trivial thing, it's a trauma of Colonialism. Americans don't truly have a claim to the land they pillaged to live on. Whiteness absorbed European ethics like the borg, stripped them of a language and culture, and all they have left is getting run over by a Ford F250 in a Walmart parking lot.

    So a lot of white Americans have this near libidinal need to tie themselves to a culture they consider to be more real or substantive. I don't think that's a trivial desire, but insisting that you're Italian, despite not knowing anything about the place, or claiming your great great great grandma was a Cherokee princess, or some shit.... That ain't it

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago

    FWIW, I don't think it's a practice exclusive to whiteness, since marginalized groups will establish a nucleus of cultural identity as well. Whiteness will supplant that cultural identity in all but name, eliminating the need for traditional ethnic enclaves, but there are still plenty of legitimate (mostly non-white) subcultures in North America with shared practices and traditions that are not wholly American either.

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  • [–] 21 points 3 months ago (10 children)

    Also, people in Canada: “we hate the Quebecois”

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  • [–] 8 points 3 months ago (4 children)

    We love them because we can immediately tell they aren't American.

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  • [–] 6 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    Without QC we'd have turned indistinguishable from Americans.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    You guys aren’t all that different from us Americans. You are us on a time delay. You see all the awful shit we do and resist at first, but when the outrage starts dying down you do the same awful shit too.

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  • It's a bit more ugly than that given the historical context. Because of religious and political realities, French Canadiens relative to Canadians are more like Ireland for the British. There is some leftover racism from that era but most urban Canadians don't fall in the old patterns.

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  • [–] 9 points 3 months ago

    Sorry. We got other things to hate on right now that are worth more hate than the French.

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