Lots of US tourists in Paris currently. Overheard a couple of weeks ago:
Waiter: Un café? Un dessert?
Elderly lady tourist: I'm sorry, in English?
Waiter: A coffee? A dessert?
Waiter: Un café? Un dessert?
Elderly lady tourist: I'm sorry, in English?
Waiter: A coffee? A dessert?
I'm somewhat the defacto interviewer at my company for latino interviewees because of my time in south america. I don't even speak spanish barring enough to survive, but I can understand their english better than my peers. When they asked how I was understanding what they said, I didn't even realize I was the only one getting it.
I think people in general should hang out in strange lands to get your brain to be more flexible to different kinds of inputs even if you don't plan learning a new language.
I'm kind of the opposite of you. My hearing is extremely sensitive to a fault and picks up more than I even want. I'll say that I'm easily overwhelmed when there is a lot of competing noise though.
A bit like "the French have no word for entrepreneur" (-- George w. Bush, alledgedly)
And that's leaving out that the articles make it harder. If you don't speak French, knowing where the spaces go in uncafe isn't automatic (although written as one word it is much easier than verbally).
I recommend everyone try it before you judge the elderly lady.
Although, I may have been able to figure it out from context (end of a meal, sitting down at a coffee and desert place)
I mean, lots of us have trouble understanding various British accents, before slang even enters the game.
His French is excellent. I really loved the early seasons, where he was teaching French to a Glaswegian woman. French with a Glasgow accent is baffling and beautiful.
The pronunciation of "café" is more similar to English, but spoken at conversational speed it can still be hard to parse. The article and the word flow together; it would sound like "ahcuhfay" (with the last syllable sort of fading out).
I'm still learning French. I watch French language films with the subtitles on, because even when I know 100% of the vocabulary I often can't follow the spoken words without a nudge to provide context.
French is a lovely language, but it's conspicuously mushy. They French are aware of it. There are many language resources that over-enunciate as an educational tool.
So I sympathize with the elderly tourist. Those words are very similar on the page, but in a noisy cafe I could see myself confused as well.
He says “I can tell you that the prime minister [Blair] never heard George Bush say that, and he certainly never told [his friend] Shirley Williams that President Bush did say it. If she put this in a speech, it must have been a joke.”
While Blair / Campbell have an obvious interest in denying this (it's not good to be rude about other countries leaders), we might reasonably be suspicious of Campbell's denial.
This is still useful if our interest is "When was this said?" because we know Shirley Williams talks about it, so e.g. if some future historian is wondering about a claim Trump said this to Johnson, they've got this record that well, this particular "American Presidents are idiots" quote certainly pre-dates that.
There a lot of interesting turns of phrase where that is primarily what we care about - did Franklin say that stuff about hanging together or hanging separately? Perhaps not. This play on words does however seem to originate in that period, you won't find it much earlier than the American Revolution, while by the 19th century it's commonplace.