4w ago

How people react when you try to speak their language

Map Porn @lemmy.ml

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French here, it's quite the opposite actually. I think it's basic politeness to try a few words of the language of the country you're in, and French do enjoy it :) (not the parisiens, but nobody likes the parisians anyway)
- We stayed in Paris for a few days for my sister's wedding. We know some Canadian french, and the Parisians were ok with that. Never got any bad reactions. I was a little worried about how it would go over with the reputation they have.
- yes, this is also what I read, that French people are mostly happy to hear a foreigner speak their language, certainly happier than if they have to speak in a foreign language...
  I have been to France a few times and speak French very imperfectly, yet no one has ever told me not to speak French.
- As a Dutch person visiting France often: this is the case, and French people nowadays do their best to speak English, not always with great results, but it's way better than twenty years ago.
  But there must be an attempt at French, at least a bonjour. If you assume English will be spoken by default you'll have a hard time (and I fully agree)
  
  The map is only for if you try to speak their language.
- When I visited France, I always attempted to speak French, and would explain in French that I was very bad at it, and I only had good interactions where people seemed to appreciate the attempt and would switch to English for me or if they didn't speak English we would just use google translate. Even in Paris.
- We've just been on the french north coast last week (from Austria) and I was also positively surprised. Everybody was really nice and spoke English very well. I'm still traumatized by 4 years of french in school because whenever I said something I was scolded that the pronunciation is wrong. Unfortunately that made me hate the french language, but french people made me more confident now and maybe I can set my peace with french now.
  
  Yeah if you go to the north around Normandy, French people there love English speakers and are super friendly if you try to speak French. Like OP mentioned, it's Parisians that are assholes.
  
  Glad to hear!
- When I was visiting Alsace with my family, we witnessed a stereotypical interaction between the loud English speaking Americans and the French hotel staff, and neither could communicate well, and both were frustrated. My family was next in line, and the hotel staff looked at us like, "oh God, what's next," but when we started talking to them in French they melted. They were so happy that we could communicate easily, and were so much more relaxed.
- I never had seen a French person frowning at the worst possible attempt at French.
  Your French could sound like a seal having a stroke while tripping on acid, like a 1920 Ford T coughing on sugar reach diesel, like a dyslexic Albanian speaking Icelandic - and still the result will be at least an attempt at understanding and communication.
  Compare that to Germany, where one mispronounced syllable in a conversation with a native aboriginal make the same effect as if you were telling them a double 4-disk Enigma encrypted message.
- French here too. Its accurate and the map is wrong. We love when people speak French with weird accents, its fun.
  
  Sounds like France should be light blue but leave Paris as it is, many of them get so angry if you try French.
- Or the Walloons. At least not when I grew up there trying to learn the languages.
- I had a lovely experience with a Parisian lady where I, for the life of me, couldn't remember "magasin" when I was trying to buy my child a toy as a gift and bless her heart she stayed with me until she eventually got it and we both squealed together.

Ireland is incorrect. The majority would be blue or red.
- The majority of Ireland speaks English. 39% claim to speak some Irish. 1.5% speak it daily. 10% can speak it well.
  
  The map says "how people react when you try to speak their language" Irish is the native language of Ireland. No matter how many people try to say otherwise even with the petty "people claim to speak it"
  The Irish language is also in the middle of big revival after the British had criminalised it for centuries and tried to kill it. The fact that it still survives is a testament to the people. It is still considered Irelands language, and I know only a handful of a people of a certain creed that would say otherwise or try to dispute it, and they wouldn't be considered Irish imho.
- I was going to comment the same, did the person who made this think Ireland is an English speaking country? If so I would suggest they read "Translations" by Brian Friel.
  
  I know about revitalization efforts for Irish Gaelic but doesn't the majority speak English?
  
  The one for England is wrong anyway.
  If you come to England and attempt to speak to them in bad English, you don't get "no reaction" you get them shouting at you in the mistaken belief that raising their voices makes it easier to understand.

I ran a marathon in Italy once on a trip through Spain, France, and Italy with my sister. She speaks fluent Spanish and I can speak tourist French now but back then, I was semi-fluent. (I can read French now and everything is self-checkout but can’t form a complex sentence.)
Anyway, Italian is 80% hand gestures. In France, it’s like “Don’t try, American idiot.” In Italy, it’s like 37 hand gestures and one or two words. I couldn’t find my sign-in booth and I asked if I could run the race anyway and they just waved their hands and said “Go.” And the photographer somehow matched me up with my number that was in some sign-in booth.
I started 20 minutes late and probably came in last place. But every little village made special treats for us so you’d stop and have an espresso and some delicious snack. Perfect marathon. 10 of 10. Would run again. And carb loading in France/Italy is definitely not the worst plan I’ve had.

You give a French person one deep French accent "hoh hoh hoh" laugh and suddenly you're no longer allowed to talk.
- Even if it's preceded by a hearty "kwahssan"?

My experience in France has been closer to one of the blue colors. They seem to very much prefer when someone at least tries, even if they’re struggling.
- France or Paris?
  
  Not the original commenter, but I've heard that may just be a Paris thing which I think you're hinting at. I've personally been to Paris and had the expected negative experience, but in my singular visit to Montreal (not actually France), the people I talked to were very open to people trying to speak French. Heard that the Montreal experience is closer to the norm and Paris just kind of sucks.
  
  Both, really. Maybe it helped that my first time was really only speaking to waitstaff or hotel employees, or pharmacists (I’d gotten a cold)? That first time my French was my worst, high school French and I’d been out of school 2 years (did not go to university right away). The next time I’d been to university and minored in French, and the last time I was with my wife’s family, who are French.

One of the Japanese YouTubers I found while looking for resources to help learn Japanese outside of DuoLingo was SoraTheTroll, specifically a bunch of meme videos of "what Americans coming to Japan think it's like vs how it actually is."
Quite a lot of "non Japanese person claims you must be super polite, and also super fluent in the language or you'll piss people off, when the reality is you can say 'konnichiwa' in the whitest way possible and the common response is going to be 'wow! Your Japanese is very good!'"
- Trying to learn Japanese as a native english speaker gave me a lot of respect for Japanese (and I think Asians in general, since I suspect other languages in the area are more similar to each other than they are to European languages) people who learn to speak even broken English. Our languages are so different, from the alphabets used, to the way words are formed, to sentence structure, and even having formality baked into things like verb conjugation and titles for everyone based on what your relationship is with them (with different defaults based on how the relationship starts).
  So assuming going from Japanese to English is a similar difficulty, it doesn't surprise me that they might have a similar respect for those who make an attempt to learn their language.
  After a year of learning (though with admittedly varying levels of motivation), I can still only pick out some words while listening or reading and can barely form my own sentences with a very limited vocabulary. Though I think part of that is duolingo particularly sucking for english - > japanese. My year sub expires tomorrow but duolingo never even hinted at formality being baked into the language and treats kanji as after thoughts.
  What resources did you find btw?
  
  Mostly just was looking for actual culturally relevant conversations in every day, natural Japanese because it became super apparent early on that DuoLingo was only teaching the most formal way of speaking. A lot of just random kind of family home videos people uploaded and news from Japanese media outlets.
  Outside of that, I have a flash card program on my PC but I can't remember the name off the top of my head (and am not home to look). That helps a lot with learning more vocab.
  
  I have a friend who is Chinese and he struggles with grammar sometimes like he gets confused by the difference between "he" and "she" and every time he apologizes I'm like "dude you speak English infinitely better than I speak Chinese, you're good",
- "cow-knee-she-waur, ay mate?"

Is Ireland based off English, or Gaelic? Because I'd imagine the reaction is different.

My partner has been learning Norwegian and some of the reactions from native speakers lean toward the red.
It's not about difficulty (it's one of the easier languages for English speakers), but moreso that they believe it's pretty useless outside of Norway lol
- They arent exatcly wrong here.
- same here in sweden, at least me personally
  like, you know we speak english right? why would you try to badly speak fractions of our language when it would be so much easier to just start with english? it's not impressive or endearing to speak bad swedish, it's just awkward. Our language isn't some special magic we hold dear, it's just what we speak to each other, the same as anglophones speak english to each other.
  
  I was always taught that it's disrespectful to begin in English. The idea is I should be able to use basic phrases, to clearly apoloize for not speaking their language, and then hopefully we switch to my language.
  Launching straight into English in someone else's country seems arrogant.

I thought French people hated it when you talked English to them without even saying Bon jour first.
- i once politely asked some middle-aged lady in Paris a question in English. She understood me perfectly fine and proceeded to give me detailed directions in french.
  I'm still not sure what that was about.
  (I'm very obviously not British or US-American, so that wasn't it.)
  
  Maybe she could understand English but wasn’t good at speaking it? English pronunciation is kind of tricky. It doesn’t explain why she thought you would understand French, though.
- Its only the Parisians. If you start in English they rightly see that as rude.
  But if you start in French they also hate it and are at pains to let you know how much your French sucks and how they couldn't understand it.
  Which, would be fair enough, but seems suspicious when the rest of France can.

The UK countries and parts of Russia are both wrong.
They = keeps speaking their own language to you, but automatically make it 10x louder.

As a Finn I usually just go: "Yeah, you don't need to torture yourself. We can just do english." So it's a mix of Finland and Sweden.

this is basically habitability zones
- it's mostly just split by language families with exceptions in French and English, and for some reason Northern Slavics react more like Uralics than Southern Slavics who react like Romances, and also there's Turkish

northern slavs think their language is harder than southern slavs?
very accurate red for the uralics tho. and very, very accurate hype from the turks. love me some turks.
also if this map included north american hispanohablantes it would be baby blue

as a Hungarian, true xD you don't need to do this to yourself

I would have imagined that Wales would be the dark green color.

Ok I'm very interested in how the person who made the map decided the colours, as in why was Slovenia explicitly singled out from the south Slavic countries?
- Slovene is an outlier from the other south slavic languages and has a bunch of dialectal shenanigans so its quite impressive if you can speak to someone in slovene as a foreigner as sometimes even natives struggle with other dialects.
  
  Yeah but I'm surprised someone would know this if they're not from the region, and also why would that make them put it in the same group as e.g. Polish. Plus I feel like it's as different from Serbo-Croatian as Macedonian is, so why not single them out as well. I mean I know I'm nitpicking and this is just a funny map, but I'm still very intrigued at why someone decided to randomly do that.

The punchline here was once true but it's getting seriously out of date.

Doubt about the Germs tho.
Think only yesterday one of them posted a link without mentioning it was totally in German, bcs they think everyone knows their language.
I had the misfortune of spending time there before and swore never to go back.
10 years later I couldn't avoid it and had to be there a few days for work.
First interaction was in a gas station on a highway.
You know, where plenty people come from various countries.
Me "Sorry, do you speak English?"
Gas Germ: "Nein!" In the most fascist -WTF are you thinking!- manner.
I immediately turned around and walked back to the car where there was a cop furiously yelling at my co-worker for the crime of stopping in the wrong place (with him being in the car).
All in German, despite the obvious foreign license plate.
That was when I decided to never speak to one of them again and let my co-worker deal with it from then on.
Had some awkward situations with me just ignoring anything they said or asked, at best point to my co-worker when he was around.
- Lol are you upset that Germans were speaking German to you in Germany? Breh...

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