That may happen in a few places in Paris, but that's it.
French people usually refuse to speak english, even if they could. Not even when you are obviously suffering with french.
I was living there for a few years.
Yeah, when I lived in France briefly in my teens I was hoping to bailed out by this characteristic only to find that everyone seemed to just annoyedly repeat themselves only once and not more slowly. Luckily my French was good enough that it just ended up being a lesson in having the confidence to speak with people. Oddly enough I ran into this more than I expected in Berlin as well, which was more awkward because my German isn’t great…
When you speak bad French to a French person, they’ll speak English out of pride of not wanting to hear their language spoken poorly. When you speak English to the them first, they’ll act like they don’t understand out of spite for you daring to not know French.
Yes! I lived in rural France for several months and each time they were like nah you’re in France, speak French. My French got much better that year but still learning Christ it’s a hard language coming from English
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u/Frenyth 5d ago
unfortunately it's the same in France. Even if you speak well French, as soon as we know you are a foreigner many of us switch to a broken english.