When I went to France after taking French in high school I tried speaking French to various people and they usually responded to me in English. That’s certainly one way to say “your French is shit.”
When I went to France I remembered enough high school French to ask for directions, but didn’t remember enough to understand the reply. Luckily everyone spoke English anyway.
French people are so bad at speaking english that those who can manage want to show it off at every opportunity.
But in Montréal, it’s more a matter of an inferiority complex from french speakers. And the habit to be forced to speak english with those who don’t want to learn french.
Bro I made so much effort to learn this foreign language, of course I am going to use it whenever I have the occasion!
I do this also with other language I know.
I tried to buy cigarettes. “Winston, s’il vous plait,” while pointing at them. Lady started screaming for her colleague, “anglais!” Then I had to ask for them in English.
People that have lived in France for years and speak perfect French told me that when they try to order something in French the waiters just look at at them with contempt and respond in English. It’s not you, it’s them.
I have never heard of that happening like ever, with the exception being tourist places in Paris, where there are 99% of non natives because if you’re not a tourist you stay out of those places (paris is littered with fantastic restaurants).
I had a similar problem when I lived in Japan, but it manifested in sort of the opposite manner. My Japanese was shit, but my work (as an English teacher) required that I answer the phone using a long Japanese greeting.
Eventually, I could do that greeting in my sleep with very little accent. And I have a name that could be mistaken for a Japanese name.
Inevitably, I’d finish the greeting and they’d respond with a torrent of full speed Japanese that I couldn’t understand at all.
I considered doing the greeting poorly, but instead, I just said “Hello” in English after finishing the greeting and people usually got the idea.
Sorry, off topic but your comment about the Japanese phone getting reminded me of when I worked at an English school too.
My coworker, who is 100% Japanese, was just off her game that day and instead of “お電話ありがとうございます〇〇です” she greeted a random caller with “おめでとうございます〇〇です” lol
It was really cute. She of course committed sudoku in shame soon after.
Mine was in my native language, not Japanese, but I also had a job that mandated a long greeting. I also had cause to repeat it sufficiently frequently that I could have done so in my sleep. In fact …
Once I was at home, in bed, asleep. I had a dream that my work phone was ringing. Of course, I wasn’t fully awake (or really at all) and my work phone was at work, not near my bed. In my half awake state, I picked up the nearest thing I could find - my personal cell phone - and recited the long spiel. Only after several minutes of slowly blinking myself awake did I realize my cell phone wasn’t connected to anyone and, also, I wasn’t at work.
The only character I had engaged was my dog, who was staring at me in apparent confusion. Probably that was just because I had gone from dead asleep to jerking upright grabbing my cell phone, but I like to think that in his head he was thinking I was a dumbass for thinking I was at work.
My gf studied Dutch for years, came over to NL, spoke to my parents in Dutch, all good.
Then we ordered things in a café. She kept speaking Dutch, the waitress understood, but kept replying in English with a heavy accent. Then switched to Dutch when speaking to me.
I’ve always heard those stories and couldn’t imagine anyone being so rude but yeah.
My pronunciation is pretty good. Comprehension not so much. And when I try this, I usually get hit woth the fastest French ever, as if I was a native speaker.
Same thing happened to me when I went to southern Mexico. I tried using the 3.5 years of Spanish I took and they barely even tried to humor me. At least the housekeepers were pretty chill and would indulge my not amazing Spanish lol
I worked for a year in the entertainment department on Queen Mary 2. On one voyage there was one French family who were very pleasant. So I attempted to be a Good Employee greeted them at the door of the theatre one evening with a cheery “Bon soir!”, as per my GCSE French.
The following seconds were exceptionally awkward, as I had no idea what they replied with.
edit: well, I’m not a fan of that. Here’s what it says, minus the examples
A piece of sport, a joke; a jesting matter, a trifle; a sportive trick or cheat. the jig is up (or the jig is over) = ‘the game is up’, it is all over. Now dialect or slang.
A “jig” is afast lively dance, usually somewhat comical in appearance.
Because jigs were often performed as comic interludes or sketches at the end of plays, the word “jig” started to mean a a piece of entertainment or a “performance.”
Eventually, slang-users in Elizabethan England started using “jig” to mean a clever trick or a “con.” If you were “playing a jig” on someone, you were fooling them.
“Up” means that the “time for the performance is up” or concluded. The most common way we use “up” to mean finished is in relation to time. When a clock runs out, the time is “up.”
Imagine a cup being filled with water. When it reaches the brim (the top), it is full; it can’t take anymore. In the same way, when a situation or a “jig” (a trick) reaches its limit of time or tolerance, it is “up” at the brim.
In English, we often add “up” to verbs to show that an action is finished 100%. This is known as a “completive particle” in the study of language.
I went to Paris once, and despite everything I had heard my whole life, if you start off with a Bonjour and end with a Merci, in between, the locals are almost all perfectly happy to speak English with you.
I’m sure I say these things with a thick American accent so they all know not to continue too much further in French.
Yeah most people are self conscious about their accent/vocabulary so if you roll in speaking English it kinda feels like you’re going “hey I expect you to bend over backwards to try to speak my language while I’m visiting your country” which is of course even worse if they’re working at the time. Opening with any attempt to speak French shows that you’re willing to accommodate them and the person will immediately be more relaxed at the idea of exposing just how bad their English is.
I went to the many places in small villages, think about 200 people there, and was welcomed with open arms.
My French was bad but with trying to talk with hands and feet in English and French did a lot. They learned English and I learned French.
i’ve worked as a cashier in quebec, and i promise you if you don’t speak french, don’t pretend, you’ll only make things more awkward for everyone lol. personally, if someone speaks to me in french, even with a big accent, i reply in french, tho i know that not everyone does
ask if we speak english, more often than not (especially in montreal) the answer will be yes, and if not we’ll get someone who does. (at least that’s how it was where i worked, maybe other places who are less used to have english-speaking customers would react differently)
when you go in with the plan of saying “one coffee please” and you know how to say it and you think you know how to pay for it, and then you get a question you don’t understand after “hello”, that is something i can relate to
i guess it’s probably different in canada, where english is a majority language, so you can basically assume everyone speaks it, but when i was driving through germany, i first tried using my rusty german, and if/when i reached my limits, i asked if they spoke english
and also it’s a challenge for oneself, i wouldn’t want to take that away from people, although i can see how it can be frustrating when a long queue halts for some time due to communication issues
I only know enough French to start bar fights in Montreal, which gets awkward because the folks involved are generally better at bar fights than I am.
Regardless, I’m convinced there is nothing in this world more satisfying than a hearty “TabarNAK” at just the right moment. Fuck’s a great word, but there’s just something about those extra two syllables and the emphasis at the end that fills me with joy.
I’m french and I fucking love the sacres. It is my personal opinion that my countrymen mock québécois and its accents because they’re jealous of the funny expressions and the way they can seamlessly slip some English words in any sentence with an impeccable accent.
I personally rank it slightly below Tabarnak, but it’s still an S-tier cuss. It does have the hissing sound going for it if you emphasize the end, which I quite like.
Some words have a different meaning, they use a lot of English words, and have a unique accent. We Frenchmen can understand québécois with minimal difficulty.
The easiest way to compare is Irish/Scottish relative to global English. Or better yet, a thick American southern accent compared to a British accent.
The idioms, the accent etc all have their particularity. Typically quebecers can understand French from France but the opposite is a little more difficult.
All that being said, just like all languages there’s localised variations around quebec. And a trained hear can usually tell the difference between someone from Gatineau, Montréal, quebec, Gaspésie or Lac St-Jean.
Interestingly, Québécois French is less likely to use loanwords like “le weekend”, preferring instead to use terms like “fin de semaine” (literally “end of the week"). In terms of vocab used, a French person is still likely to understand a Québécois French speaker (and vice versa). I can’t speak for how much impact accent has on intelligibility though
Source: English person who did 8 years of French in high school, who also has a French Canadian friend
I lived with a French Canadian while living in France. They like to get so high and mighty about speaking “purer” French with “less loanwords”, but I would say they use just as many if not more.
One example was a day we started taking about cars. I hear him use words like “wheel” and “bumper” (literally just the English words with a French accent) and I’m like “bro do they really not use the French words for those in Canada?”
French people and French-Canadians both use anglicisms, just in different ways.
For example, if we take the sentence “I parked my car in the parking lot for the weekend”, someone from France might say:
J’ai stationné ma voiture dans le parking pendant le weekend
whereas someone from Canada could say
J’ai parké mon char dans le stationnement pour la fin de semaine
Both have influence from English, but in different places. English loanwords in Canada tend to originate from the beginning of the 20th century (a reason why many car-related terms in Canadian French are anglicisms, such as “bumper") and in France loanwords tend to be a more recent phenomenon.
I suppose it wasn’t all in high school. It was between the ages of 10 and 18, which would mean that it was from Year 5 to Year 13. In my country, secondary school is from year 7 to year 13; I said “in high school” because that’s when the majority of it took place
They do like the words un hamburger/hotdog. They have their own slang, want to test your mingled(mangled) language skills? Try talking to an Acadian, a mixture of french and english in the same sentence, so much fun. Accent has a HUGE effect, rural folk(not living in the cities like MTL, Quebec city, and a few others) can have such a thick accent I can’t understand 2/3 of their words
Some pronunciations are very different for sure. For example, France French says montagne (mountain) sort of like mohn-tahn-yeh, and in Montreal it’s mohn-taine.
Le Jig est dessus. Mon français est parlant surtout. J’ai difficilement ecriter le Français parse que je apprendant actuellement. Alors, nous utilisons “Quesse ça” rarement en mon region. Desole mon ecrivant est merde.
When I went to Montreal, I’m not exaggerating when I say that every single service worker I interacted with opened with “Bonjour, hello!” You would only have to fuck that up once if you didn’t realize what was happening there.
Yeah. You can tell the people who don’t travel internationally that much always insist on trying to speak the local language as much as possible without understanding the high time cost of language switching in the middle of the interaction instead of establishing the language at the beginning.
My favorite phrase is one I made to remember the unrelated vocabulary words on a page: je suis une fermier de paumplemousse et j’aime faire de l’apinisme.
Why grapefruit, farmer, and mountain climbing were together is anyone’s guess.
Nice, that phrase will definitely save your life the day you get arrested for littering citrus sheddings but the world at large happens to be vitamin-C deficient after climate change and water levels rising have pushed what remains of humanity to the heights of major mountain ranges where citrus trees can’t naturally grow and they need a specialist with experience both in pamplemousse farming and alpinism to save our kind
Thank you, I do my best to output credible scenarios. Are you interested in a little correction of your phrase, or are its quirks part of the memory and the charm ?
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When I went to France after taking French in high school I tried speaking French to various people and they usually responded to me in English. That’s certainly one way to say “your French is shit.”
When I went to France I remembered enough high school French to ask for directions, but didn’t remember enough to understand the reply. Luckily everyone spoke English anyway.
French people are so bad at speaking english that those who can manage want to show it off at every opportunity.
But in Montréal, it’s more a matter of an inferiority complex from french speakers. And the habit to be forced to speak english with those who don’t want to learn french.
Bro I made so much effort to learn this foreign language, of course I am going to use it whenever I have the occasion!
I do this also with other language I know.
I tried to buy cigarettes. “Winston, s’il vous plait,” while pointing at them. Lady started screaming for her colleague, “anglais!” Then I had to ask for them in English.
No need to bother with French.
Its like there’s a nation actively trying to kill its own language.
Lingua Franca indeed.
People that have lived in France for years and speak perfect French told me that when they try to order something in French the waiters just look at at them with contempt and respond in English. It’s not you, it’s them.
Wut?
I have never heard of that happening like ever, with the exception being tourist places in Paris, where there are 99% of non natives because if you’re not a tourist you stay out of those places (paris is littered with fantastic restaurants).
From a Swede in France.
I had a similar problem when I lived in Japan, but it manifested in sort of the opposite manner. My Japanese was shit, but my work (as an English teacher) required that I answer the phone using a long Japanese greeting.
Eventually, I could do that greeting in my sleep with very little accent. And I have a name that could be mistaken for a Japanese name.
Inevitably, I’d finish the greeting and they’d respond with a torrent of full speed Japanese that I couldn’t understand at all.
I considered doing the greeting poorly, but instead, I just said “Hello” in English after finishing the greeting and people usually got the idea.
Sorry, off topic but your comment about the Japanese phone getting reminded me of when I worked at an English school too.
My coworker, who is 100% Japanese, was just off her game that day and instead of “お電話ありがとうございます〇〇です” she greeted a random caller with “おめでとうございます〇〇です” lol
It was really cute. She of course committed sudoku in shame soon after.
Mine was in my native language, not Japanese, but I also had a job that mandated a long greeting. I also had cause to repeat it sufficiently frequently that I could have done so in my sleep. In fact …
Once I was at home, in bed, asleep. I had a dream that my work phone was ringing. Of course, I wasn’t fully awake (or really at all) and my work phone was at work, not near my bed. In my half awake state, I picked up the nearest thing I could find - my personal cell phone - and recited the long spiel. Only after several minutes of slowly blinking myself awake did I realize my cell phone wasn’t connected to anyone and, also, I wasn’t at work.
The only character I had engaged was my dog, who was staring at me in apparent confusion. Probably that was just because I had gone from dead asleep to jerking upright grabbing my cell phone, but I like to think that in his head he was thinking I was a dumbass for thinking I was at work.
Dur mais réel.
That’s how it was in NL too.
We’d say hello / good morning in Dutch and they’d clock my accent and switch to better English than I could muster.
My gf studied Dutch for years, came over to NL, spoke to my parents in Dutch, all good.
Then we ordered things in a café. She kept speaking Dutch, the waitress understood, but kept replying in English with a heavy accent. Then switched to Dutch when speaking to me.
I’ve always heard those stories and couldn’t imagine anyone being so rude but yeah.
Oh they weren’t being rude to me.
I had it explained as “15 million Dutch people speak mostly Dutch, but we all speak French / English / German cuz they can’t stop fighting wars here”
My pronunciation is pretty good. Comprehension not so much. And when I try this, I usually get hit woth the fastest French ever, as if I was a native speaker.
Same thing happened to me when I went to southern Mexico. I tried using the 3.5 years of Spanish I took and they barely even tried to humor me. At least the housekeepers were pretty chill and would indulge my not amazing Spanish lol
I worked for a year in the entertainment department on Queen Mary 2. On one voyage there was one French family who were very pleasant. So I attempted to be a Good Employee greeted them at the door of the theatre one evening with a cheery “Bon soir!”, as per my GCSE French.
The following seconds were exceptionally awkward, as I had no idea what they replied with.
I learned a lesson that day.
Try leading with “Hello-Bongjoor”, they’ll understand.
I’m not familiar with the “jig is up” saying. Someone mind explaining it?
It means something to the effect of “I’ve been caught in a lie and can’t keep up the act anymore”
The meaning behind the idiom is that “jig” is an old term for a trick, so you’re no longer fooling the person.
I thought it was “jig” like the dance, so the metaphorical dance is over
Seems it’s one of those definitions that only survives in a idiom:
https://www.etymonline.com/word/jig
Huh, you’re right. I checked the OED online (it’s a subscription thing through my library, here’s the link the OED “cite” button gives, let’s see if it’s paywalled: Oxford English Dictionary, “jig (n.1), sense 5,” December 2025, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/1036112357](https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/1036112357).)
edit: well, I’m not a fan of that. Here’s what it says, minus the examples
No dice, paywalled
that’s a shame. I’ve edited the text into my comment above.
It actually does originate from that! But “jig” meaning “trick” is slang.
Cat’s out of the bag
A “jig” is afast lively dance, usually somewhat comical in appearance.
Because jigs were often performed as comic interludes or sketches at the end of plays, the word “jig” started to mean a a piece of entertainment or a “performance.”
Eventually, slang-users in Elizabethan England started using “jig” to mean a clever trick or a “con.” If you were “playing a jig” on someone, you were fooling them.
“Up” means that the “time for the performance is up” or concluded. The most common way we use “up” to mean finished is in relation to time. When a clock runs out, the time is “up.”
Imagine a cup being filled with water. When it reaches the brim (the top), it is full; it can’t take anymore. In the same way, when a situation or a “jig” (a trick) reaches its limit of time or tolerance, it is “up” at the brim.
In English, we often add “up” to verbs to show that an action is finished 100%. This is known as a “completive particle” in the study of language.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/the%20jig%20is%20up
Thanks for asking, it have been quite confusing. Like hello, hello, what can I get you, ouch busted … 😁
A swede in France.
I went to Paris once, and despite everything I had heard my whole life, if you start off with a Bonjour and end with a Merci, in between, the locals are almost all perfectly happy to speak English with you.
I’m sure I say these things with a thick American accent so they all know not to continue too much further in French.
“I’d much rather stumble around in English than witness whatever the fuck you’re about to do to my mother tongue” - the French
But yes, a simple “Parlez vous anglais?” puts most conversations firmly in friendly territory. It’s entitlement that puts most people off.
Yeah most people are self conscious about their accent/vocabulary so if you roll in speaking English it kinda feels like you’re going “hey I expect you to bend over backwards to try to speak my language while I’m visiting your country” which is of course even worse if they’re working at the time. Opening with any attempt to speak French shows that you’re willing to accommodate them and the person will immediately be more relaxed at the idea of exposing just how bad their English is.
That’s a Paris thing
Go even a meter outside the city and people will pretty much ignore you when you don’t talk french
Source: the bunch of French people I know
I went to the many places in small villages, think about 200 people there, and was welcomed with open arms. My French was bad but with trying to talk with hands and feet in English and French did a lot. They learned English and I learned French.
…
Viva la France
Viva las vegas
Vive la france
i’ve worked as a cashier in quebec, and i promise you if you don’t speak french, don’t pretend, you’ll only make things more awkward for everyone lol. personally, if someone speaks to me in french, even with a big accent, i reply in french, tho i know that not everyone does
ask if we speak english, more often than not (especially in montreal) the answer will be yes, and if not we’ll get someone who does. (at least that’s how it was where i worked, maybe other places who are less used to have english-speaking customers would react differently)
when you go in with the plan of saying “one coffee please” and you know how to say it and you think you know how to pay for it, and then you get a question you don’t understand after “hello”, that is something i can relate to
i guess it’s probably different in canada, where english is a majority language, so you can basically assume everyone speaks it, but when i was driving through germany, i first tried using my rusty german, and if/when i reached my limits, i asked if they spoke english
and also it’s a challenge for oneself, i wouldn’t want to take that away from people, although i can see how it can be frustrating when a long queue halts for some time due to communication issues
I only know enough French to start bar fights in Montreal, which gets awkward because the folks involved are generally better at bar fights than I am.
Regardless, I’m convinced there is nothing in this world more satisfying than a hearty “TabarNAK” at just the right moment. Fuck’s a great word, but there’s just something about those extra two syllables and the emphasis at the end that fills me with joy.
I’m french and I fucking love the sacres. It is my personal opinion that my countrymen mock québécois and its accents because they’re jealous of the funny expressions and the way they can seamlessly slip some English words in any sentence with an impeccable accent.
CaaAAAAaalice
Idk, I also really like when they chain them all together. Tabarnak de calice d’ostie de saint ciboire
<3
I personally rank it slightly below Tabarnak, but it’s still an S-tier cuss. It does have the hissing sound going for it if you emphasize the end, which I quite like.
written french is a lot easier to understand than spoken french, we need IRL real time subtitles for these people…
ahn kwassan!
Great fishing in Keebec.
I loves fishing in Kwee-bec!
Isn’t French in Quebec very different from everywhere else that speaks French?
Some words have a different meaning, they use a lot of English words, and have a unique accent. We Frenchmen can understand québécois with minimal difficulty.
Thank you. I have heard differently before, but never from a first hand source.
The easiest way to compare is Irish/Scottish relative to global English. Or better yet, a thick American southern accent compared to a British accent.
The idioms, the accent etc all have their particularity. Typically quebecers can understand French from France but the opposite is a little more difficult.
All that being said, just like all languages there’s localised variations around quebec. And a trained hear can usually tell the difference between someone from Gatineau, Montréal, quebec, Gaspésie or Lac St-Jean.
Interestingly, Québécois French is less likely to use loanwords like “le weekend”, preferring instead to use terms like “fin de semaine” (literally “end of the week"). In terms of vocab used, a French person is still likely to understand a Québécois French speaker (and vice versa). I can’t speak for how much impact accent has on intelligibility though
Source: English person who did 8 years of French in high school, who also has a French Canadian friend
I lived with a French Canadian while living in France. They like to get so high and mighty about speaking “purer” French with “less loanwords”, but I would say they use just as many if not more.
One example was a day we started taking about cars. I hear him use words like “wheel” and “bumper” (literally just the English words with a French accent) and I’m like “bro do they really not use the French words for those in Canada?”
French people and French-Canadians both use anglicisms, just in different ways.
For example, if we take the sentence “I parked my car in the parking lot for the weekend”, someone from France might say:
whereas someone from Canada could say
Both have influence from English, but in different places. English loanwords in Canada tend to originate from the beginning of the 20th century (a reason why many car-related terms in Canadian French are anglicisms, such as “bumper") and in France loanwords tend to be a more recent phenomenon.
8 years of French in high school, huh?
I suppose it wasn’t all in high school. It was between the ages of 10 and 18, which would mean that it was from Year 5 to Year 13. In my country, secondary school is from year 7 to year 13; I said “in high school” because that’s when the majority of it took place
I wasn’t sure if you were trying to make a joke about the quality of your ability to communicate in French lol
They do like the words un hamburger/hotdog. They have their own slang, want to test your mingled(mangled) language skills? Try talking to an Acadian, a mixture of french and english in the same sentence, so much fun. Accent has a HUGE effect, rural folk(not living in the cities like MTL, Quebec city, and a few others) can have such a thick accent I can’t understand 2/3 of their words
Some pronunciations are very different for sure. For example, France French says montagne (mountain) sort of like mohn-tahn-yeh, and in Montreal it’s mohn-taine.
For an English speaker with no french knowledge, it’s not gonna make much difference.
I still can’t quite accept that the French for “what” is literally “what is it that”
What is quoi. For “what is that?” we say “C’est quoi?”, which translates to “This is what?”.
Muchos merci, freund
Probablement qu’il parle de “Qu’est-ce que c’est que ça?” Ou “Quessé ça” en français amélioré
Le Jig est dessus. Mon français est parlant surtout. J’ai difficilement ecriter le Français parse que je apprendant actuellement. Alors, nous utilisons “Quesse ça” rarement en mon region. Desole mon ecrivant est merde.
That’s just WTF en francais, non?
“WTF is this shit” but without being vulgar.
There are shorter ways but that’s the more formal version, you can also use “que” pretty much any time you could use “qu’est-ce que”.
But that sentence literally translates to “What is it that I can offer you?” That’s just normal English albeit a bit verbose.
When I went to Montreal, I’m not exaggerating when I say that every single service worker I interacted with opened with “Bonjour, hello!” You would only have to fuck that up once if you didn’t realize what was happening there.
Une baguette SVP
*tradition
Je ne pas parle francaise.
Mon franchaise tres mal.
Par-lay-z vouze frankaise?
Non?
That’s okay, we forgive you.
Yeah. You can tell the people who don’t travel internationally that much always insist on trying to speak the local language as much as possible without understanding the high time cost of language switching in the middle of the interaction instead of establishing the language at the beginning.
I would ask if I could go to the bathroom because that’s all the French I remember from 7th grade.
My favorite phrase is one I made to remember the unrelated vocabulary words on a page: je suis une fermier de paumplemousse et j’aime faire de l’apinisme.
Why grapefruit, farmer, and mountain climbing were together is anyone’s guess.
Nice, that phrase will definitely save your life the day you get arrested for littering citrus sheddings but the world at large happens to be vitamin-C deficient after climate change and water levels rising have pushed what remains of humanity to the heights of major mountain ranges where citrus trees can’t naturally grow and they need a specialist with experience both in pamplemousse farming and alpinism to save our kind
I did say it was anyone’s guess and that one’s plausible enough!
Thank you, I do my best to output credible scenarios. Are you interested in a little correction of your phrase, or are its quirks part of the memory and the charm ?
I am always open to correction in order to better myself, merci et s’il vous plaît.
Them: “Bonjour!”
Me: “Uh… Bon Jovi!”
All I need is to get that first beer in me and two years of high school French comes flooding back until they ask me to stop.
great censoring on the name, impossible to tell who posted this