France forum < What do you like / hate most about the French?

  • Stefan Cosma

    RE: France

    posted by  Stefan Cosma in France forum 

    Hi,

    I find pretty normal for a country to try to protect it's language. I had been living in FR for 4 months and I got the big picture of what's going on there. Before going any further, I must mention that I speak English and French fluently, and German at a conversational level. Mother language is Romanian.

    A thing that I don't like about France is that you are supposed to speak perfect french, with perfect pronunciation, or you'll get a big "quoi??" It happened to me on the airport, where people should be more understanding with the foreigners trying to speak French.

    I cannot ask everybody out there to speak English. But there are some domains such as IT where EN is vital for accomplishing your tasks, read documentations and so on. In France, every technical term is translated, which is not the best practice.

    Anyways, lesson learned, I'll speak EN in France only for fun (example, "tout droit", which means "straight ahead" was translated to me as "all right").

    On the contrary, I must congratulate the Germans for being bilingual. I met a few of them in FR, they were speaking French. And German is the most widely language used in EU (and I mean by that Germany, Switzerland and Austria). I've been to Frankfurt, München and Stuttgart. Luckily I speak German, so I had no problem getting along. But what I like about them is that they kindly appreciate any struggle to speak their language, and will address to you in another one that both can understand when having problems. That's something to be learned from.

    Things I like in France: the sights, tourist attractions
    Things I don't like: food (really, to little and to expensive), the way they drive, the cheese (man, it stinks worse than my socks).

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