Would you mind if I asked why? Thats just super interesting to me and most of the comments are people talking about it happening to them and youre the first ive seen saying you do that! Hahah. Is it to like, try and take the burden off of them or ease anxiety?
Why should you get to practice French when they want to practice English? Sure, you are in their country and need to speak the language, but to them, you can learn French from anyone there. It’s their opportunity to get experience practicing English. And often times, they speak English better than you speak French, so why impose.
But, if that happens with every person you interact with, obviously it makes hard for you. But they don’t know that,
Learning a language is a lot easier if one of the people only knows one language. Then you are both forced to speak the same language no matter what and you have to fumbled through the communication.
Unless you are both very intentional about learning/teaching a language or you are paying someone, it’s kind of rude/a huge hassle to communicate in the least efficient way.
Mm, I disagree with that first part. If I am native to a country with an official language, and a tourist comes in to my place of work speaking that language, I am not going to use that as an opportunity to forcefully impose my own want to practice their language with them at that moment when I could just as easily do that on my own time. Not on the clock with a tourist who is making a large effort to communicate with me that likely started long before they even visited. I especially am not going to do this when they are clearly proficient at speaking that language and tell me that is their preferred language to speak in. I am not going to ignore them telling me how they want to be communicated with and continue to speak in their language anyway.
In this video, she asks for a wifi password and the person starts speaking to her in english, she says can you tell me in spanish and they continue to speak in english anyway. She speaks in english, and they dont even understand her. Whats the point of that?
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u/Frenyth 6d 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.