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You know you’re a language nerd when... | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5008 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes  Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 3081 of 3737 19 September 2013 at 2:20pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Of course you can be so bad but in that case, you are unlikely to pass a B2 exam for example. I surely met a lot of french who had no trouble using French with me but the % is much different than in other european countries I visited (and I have visited approximately half Europe so far). What strikes me more than my personal experience (which can be biased of course) is the number of people who have got exactly the same experience. That cannot be a coincidence in my opinion.
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| Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4908 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German | Message 3082 of 3737 19 September 2013 at 5:33pm | IP Logged | |||||
Interestingly, I had the opposite experience with some students from England in a different French aquarium (up North). The students were supposed to be practising their French, and the lady at the snackbar insisted on speaking with them in French. When the students would ask for something in English, she would tell them how to say it in French. At the time I wasn't learning French myself (I was along as a member of the Humanities deptartment), but I was disappointed that students who were in their second year of French didn't know how to say, "how much is this?" Down in Besançon, on the other hand, I successfully asked about prices and bought tickets for a boat ride. When I asked for the departure time, and I got a bit mixed up with numbers, the woman groaned loudly and spoke to me in English in an annoyed tone. She was probably someone who wasn't paid enough to really care about the customer, but still a jerk. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Tsopivo Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4470 days ago 258 posts - 411 votes Speaks: French*, English Studies: Esperanto | Message 3083 of 3737 19 September 2013 at 7:59pm | IP Logged | |||||
I have not done nor observed the same thing but I agree that I have read about it many times to discount it. If someone has trouble with French, it is usually considered polite to switch or offer to switch to their NL but I can't really see a reason why you would continue doing so if the person mention they prefer talking in French and your command of their NL is not as good as their French. That's weird.
Then keep in mind that "customer service" and this kind of reasoning ("customer is king so if he wants this then the employee has to comply") does not held the same importance worldwide. Besides, not all customers would be put out by switching to a common fluent language if service is slowed down by the poor level of a particular customer in the country's language. Edited by Tsopivo on 20 September 2013 at 8:13am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5206 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 3084 of 3737 20 September 2013 at 11:00am | IP Logged | |||||
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My experience on my last trip to France was that in most "customer service" situations, people were quite happy to speak French with me. On previous trips, when my level was lower and my pronunciation was terrible, I got a lot of switching to English, but now that I'm more comfortable and fluent in the language and speak it quite understandably, it's rarer. There are exceptions like staff in hostels and ski resorts, but these days they tend to speak near-perfect English and they're busy and want to get things done as efficiently as possible, so fair enough. The real problems and bad attitudes are with social situations: people switching immediately upon the slightest mistake or sign of discomfort and being very insistent about not speaking French, even if their English is considerably worse than my French.
It has also happened to me with Italian, although more rarely, but all my Italian speaking experiences have been here as opposed to in Italy so I can understand people being more keen to use English. I'm curious to see how things will go when I visit Italy next month. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6702 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 3085 of 3737 20 September 2013 at 3:25pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I know that a remark from me gave rise to this discussion about language choice in conversations with service persons, but maybe we should return to the examples of nerdiness which normally should characterize this thread.
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| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4827 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 3086 of 3737 20 September 2013 at 5:19pm | IP Logged | |||||
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OK.....when you can't decide whether it's German, Danish or Welsh on the MP3 player
today..... Danish is incomprehensible to listen to (sorry Iversen), Welsh is incomprehensible to read. German is really very well behaved in almost every respect. I could stay in my German comfort zone forever, but that's not quite the HTLAL way, is it. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Warp3 Senior Member United States forum_posts.asp?TID= Joined 5534 days ago 1419 posts - 1766 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Korean, Japanese | Message 3087 of 3737 22 September 2013 at 6:53pm | IP Logged | |||||
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When you are scanning across the map in Grand Theft Auto V and you happen to notice that a region of the map is called "Little Seoul". At this point, you immediately drop any mission plans you had, set a checkpoint for Little Seoul and go read all the Korean store signs there.
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| Teango Triglot Winner TAC 2010 & 2012 Senior Member United States teango.wordpress.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5555 days ago 2210 posts - 3734 votes Speaks: English*, German, Russian Studies: Hawaiian, French, Toki Pona | Message 3088 of 3737 22 September 2013 at 10:42pm | IP Logged | |||||
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When you start confusing license plates with Ancient Egyptian transliteration.
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