French is my first language, Parisians were still assholes who switched to English because they didn't like the way I spoke French.

Everyone outside Paris was cool, but I totally get the stereotypes about Parisians. I don't entirely blame them, living in a city that gets that much tourism must suck, but I am still salty at the guy working in a pizza place who served our party entirely in broken English despite us only speaking French to him.

thanks, American public schools! 🙄

😐

Hmmm

I've had an experience where I simply asked a french cashier if they spoke english and she threw a fit. Spoke to me in French and mixed my items with the next customer's.

In my experience,French people in Paris really don't want you speaking French. They almost all speak English and find bad accents irritating.

When we got to our hotel I went to the front desk and said "hey I'm sorry I don't speak much French but we have a reservation." And the lady who was Swiss looked at me and said "but you're speaking French now" and proceeded to tell me a bunch of stuff. Then she saw my face and started laughing. That little razz was one of the highlights of that trip. Any time I spoke French to anyone else they would wince and switch to English. Except for the Italian guy at one of the restaurants we went to, he was pretty cool about it.

Outside of Paris, the French people were really cool about working with my bad, broken French. Possibly because they didn't speak any more English than I did French. Usually less.

In my year learning French at school, I befriended someone in toulouse and we'd have quick occasional video chats. The face she made while i was talking made it seem like i was doing nails on chalkboard. She visibly squirmed a bit.

My teacher on the other hand noticed I pronounced certain words in a toulousian accent and was pleased. Apparently it's a nice accent. It's too bad i didn't keep going. Could have visited France and terrorized the locals by forcing them to listen to me speak.

It takes me about 15min before being able to understand the canadian accent and stop trying to recognize every words. That requires a lot of concentration to decipher each words. During my first meeting with Canadians, we had to switch back to English has it was easier to understand.

It's like when you talk to an old farmer lost in the middle of nowhere and you need subtitles to understand the words. That requires practice!

Vous parlez mal". i.e. You speak badly. I'll never forget the horror in her eye

It’s funny that she would think that our french is worse than theirs, when canadian french is closer to actual french than parisian french.

Now i wonder how long you take to say bonjour

Bong-sewer!

Relatable. I was forced to learn French in school so I've always hated it out of principle, but at least our teacher was a legitimate Frenchwoman and could bring out the sound and the melody of it. Quebecois, OTH, is a legitimate abortion of the language. Take the most abominable dialect of the English language you've ever heard and Quebecois still sounds 10x worse than that. Not even I could butcher the language with that much hatred and disrespect.

There are plenty of dialects in france similar to or worse than Quebecois. Maybe I’m biased, but to me parisian french is the one that sounds bad. In the end it was the accent of the nobility, hence why it sounds so pompous, while Quebecois was the accent of the commoners.

I take pride in my Quebecois accent tyvm. It’s the accent of the common man and it helps me avoid the unbearable snobs who sneer at people for having the gall to speak differently to them.