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Comment by impendia | Hacker News Reader

A half-remembered, and possibly apocryphal, story which another mathematician once told me:

Langlands was once invited to lecture in France, and he chose to give his talk in French. Evidently his accent was not all that good, and the audience found it a bit painful.

Jean-Pierre Serre, one of the leading mathematicians of the 20th century, and a Frenchman, was attending the lecture that day. He interrupted to ask a question, in English.

Declining to take the hint, Langlands answered in French and carried on with his lecture.

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Frenchmen are legendarily intolerant of badly-spoken French. This was a recurring theme in my couple of years as a student at Alliance Française - when in France (most people hoped to go to college or grad school there) if you're not solid don't even try.

In Brazil people will be glad you're trying and try to speak slowly in return.

Speaking bad French to French people helps them to suddenly remember that they also speak English.

German has a similar effect, too.

Yeah, this is my experience too. You should always attempt to use the language of where you are except in France. They would rather you spoke English than butchered their language. I usually keep it to please and thank you in french as a result. Although I did once use my high school french to ask where the swimming pool was once and had a bit of trouble deciphering the response I got (in french). So swimming pools and libraries and please and thank you :)

I think problem is, English accent is probably the worst. This is because pronunciation-wise there hardly are other two languages as different as English and French. (The French return the favor, obviously - their accent sounds just as terrible.)

Accent is such a non issue, in the UK the accent can be very different even 30 miles from one another, so let alone someone speaking it with a French, German or Spanish accent. It's still English and 99% of the time you can understand it. I assume the same is true of other languages too.

> Accent is such a non issue

But for the French it apparently is (and understandably so).

I meant that you can still understand the speaker, and if so it is courteous to answer. Refusing to understand because you don't like the accent is hardly courteous.

Which is ironic, given that English developed as basically French + German (or some old versions of those languages).

This is completely at odds with my experience of speaking French in France, both in major cities and small villages. My spoken French is appalling, and yet I've encountered nothing but good will from the French, happy to encourage me, and to work together to figure out what I'm trying to say.

Obviously YMMV, but your assertions are contrary to my experience.

Edit: Down-voted. Thanks for the reality check.

2nd edit: Up-voted, perhaps to compensate. Thank you to whoever did that.

There's sort of an uncanny valley sort of situation, in my experience (as an anglophone canadian with the french of a 3-4 year old): If you're clearly a foreign visitor, and you're speaking bad french, it's often appreciated and maybe found slightly charming. But once you get to the point where your french is reasonably good, but you have an obvious accent, then (some) people (might, sometimes) be more inclined to be a bit snooty about it.

Precisely. If you try a few tourist phrases, or very basic French, it will be mildly appreciated. But if you speak fluent French with a bit of an accent, particularly in the big cities, you'll frequently be met with arrogance and attempts to switch to English, even if your French is far better than your interlocutor's.

That said, in small towns and villages, this doesn't happen as much. Seems to mainly be a phenomenon in Paris and other large cities.

Also, in Quebec this is never an issue. As long as you speak fluently, Quebecois are happy to speak with you in French.

> Frenchmen are legendarily intolerant of badly-spoken French.

It may have changed now. I have been living in Paris for several years, speaking strongly accented french (but mostly understandable), and I have had no tolerance problems so far, except the occasional person who prefers to speak in english to me.

I'm fluent in French. Quebecois French. In France they're just rude about it, even when they speak terrible english. I would absolutely do the same thing.

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