Have you ever.. (General discussion) Language Learning Forum

Have you ever..
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Solfrid Cristin
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Norway
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Message 113 of 119

04 January 2014 at 8:55am | IP Logged

culebrilla wrote:

That's weird. I always thought of us Americans are being pretty welcoming compared to
most others. We are definitely more superficial than a lot of other people, I've noticed. We will smile and ask
how people are more than the Europeans I've met in Europe, for example.

Sucks that you were treated poorly when your French wasn't good. :(

You most certainly are. As long as people speak comprehensible English :-)

I am sorry if I was unclear, but I meant to compare the situations where a foreigner comes and absolutely
butchers your language. In most countries they will just be happy that you make an effort, but people with
English or French as their mother tongue tend to expect you to have a very high level, and are decidedly
unimpressed if you have not.

I have been treated with nothing but kindness by Americans - but then again I was already fluent when I went
there. I noticed that people who could hardly speak any English did not get the same respect. That is not
something that happens only in French or English speaking countries, but the rest of us do not expect people
to speak our language, and are more likely to be pleasantly surprised if the do.

Edited by Solfrid Cristin on 04 January 2014 at 8:56am
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Serpent
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Russian Federation
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Message 114 of 119

04 January 2014 at 10:47am | IP Logged

culebrilla wrote:

Serpent wrote:

culebrilla wrote:

I saw a wiklipedia discussion about mutual intelligibility and some people wrote, "I've been STUDYING Spanish for three months and I am understand Portuguese really well/easily."

The issue, again, is that beginners think they know a lot but they really don't know much at all. With three months of "low-key" studying you won't understand much of a language, let alone a relatively similar one that is still a distinct language.

Beginners in Spanish rely heavily on their English (and in some cases maybe their high school French or Latin). Portuguese and Spanish have more or less the same level of similarity to English, so in the beginning it's quite plausible to understand Portuguese as "well" (actually as badly) as Spanish.

No, but he was saying that he understood "almost everything." Don't know what you don't know.

In reality he understood almost everything he can understand in Spanish, which is reasonable for a beginner...
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Solfrid Cristin
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Norway
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Studies: Russian

Message 115 of 119

04 January 2014 at 11:13am | IP Logged

Serpent wrote:

culebrilla wrote:

Serpent wrote:

culebrilla wrote:

I saw a wiklipedia
discussion about mutual intelligibility and some people wrote, "I've been STUDYING Spanish for three
months and I am understand Portuguese really well/easily."

The issue, again, is that beginners think they know a lot but they really don't know much at all. With three
months of "low-key" studying you won't understand much of a language, let alone a relatively similar one that
is still a distinct language.

Beginners in Spanish rely heavily on their English (and in some cases
maybe their high school French or Latin). Portuguese and Spanish have more or less the same level of
similarity to English, so in the beginning it's quite plausible to understand Portuguese as "well" (actually as
badly) as Spanish.

No, but he was saying that he understood "almost everything." Don't know what you don't know.

In
reality he understood almost everything he can understand in Spanish, which is reasonable for a beginner...

I suspect that we are dealing with two different things here. The student's actual knowledge and his own
perception of his knowledge. So culebrilla is right in that his actual understanding was probably very low, and
Serpent is right in that his own perception of his understanding was probably that it was very high :-)
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Serpent
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Message 116 of 119

04 January 2014 at 1:42pm | IP Logged

My point is that the less one understands in Spanish, the more likely they are to understand the same small amount in Portuguese. The most extreme opposite is native speakers without exposure. They will understand a lot more than a beginner, but they will also compare it to their native language comprehension.
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Cristianoo
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Brazil
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Message 117 of 119

04 January 2014 at 2:39pm | IP Logged

My point wasn't about my ability or lack of ability to understand Spanish. In my
opinion, most portuguese natives from Brazil (I don't know about the others) are able
to understand basic Spanish most of the time, even without previous contact

My point is: I think it's rude to say: Ah! you are from Brazil. Nice, and start to
speak in Spanish like it was my obligation to know it. That's why I asked if I was
wrong to think like that.

I doesn't mean that I expect someone to speak in my native lang with me. On the
contrary, I have no such expectations here and I gladly accept anyone speaking any
language.

And about the Frenchs, I hear that a lot. But even so, I try to avoid forming opinions
about persons that I still have to know better. I've met some frenchs in Poland and
they were very nice to me. And yes, they've switched to English when the conversation
was very broken, but they switched back as I insisted to speak in french with them

1 person has voted this message useful

Einarr
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United Kingdom
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Message 118 of 119

04 January 2014 at 8:25pm | IP Logged

Solfrid Cristin wrote:

I think a large proportion of people who have spoken broken
French in France have had negative
experiences. That is not racism. That is just stating the facts. When I started out
learning French I
experienced two reactions from them. In the beginning when my French was bad, 98% of
the people I met
regarded me as garbage, and would not even make an effort to try and understand what I
said. After I
learned to speak fluent French I was treated like a queen.

Nowadays when I go to France (mostly Paris) what irritates me the most is that I start
out speaking French
with people at a reception, a restaurant or a shop, but the second they see my name
they go into English.
This is mostly a Paris thing though, and probably due to the vast amounts of
foreigners. In the rest of the
country they are happy to just speak French with you.

We have touched upon the attitude of the French many times, and at least when I was
younger there was a
vast difference between the French and any other nation I had encountered - with the
possible exception of
the English/Americans. Those were the only ones who expected you to be fluent in their
language, and
regarded you as an idiot if you were not. The difference of course being, that a lot of
people do speak
English, and significantly fewer speak French.

As for using one language that you speak badly in order to communicate with someone who
speaks a
related language - well you do what you can. If I had a guy from China who spoke
Swedish or Dutch, the
chances of us being able to communicate in any way would be a lot higher if he used
those languages than if
he used Mandarin. Whenever I need to ommunicate with someone from a Slavic speaking
country, I will try
Russian if we have no other language in common. I know most young people do not speak
Russian, and my
Russian is still very weak, but for a Pole, if he had to chose between me speaking
Norwegian or Russian, he
would probably go for Russian.

Oh, the French. :) Back at high school we had a couple of teachers that were French.
One of them was the marketing teacher who refused to speak anything but French, which
is understandable, because the curricula was in French, but we were 9-th graders and
our French wasn't all that good so we were unable to understand everything, especially
some more complicated notions, specific for the subject. So whenever we were to ask if
he could possibly give a translation in English he would give us that look as if we're
complete idiots. I should add that he knew English pretty well, and did understand
Bulgarian either, yet he wouldn't bother use either to make things a bit easier at
times for us.

And he was in his mid twenties back then, not exactly the strict Hogwarts teacher that
would act like that. :D

Apart from that, just as Solfrid mentioned if one was to speak to him in proper French
he would communicate to the person as if he or she were his close friends.
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eyðimörk
Triglot
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France
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Message 119 of 119

04 January 2014 at 9:59pm | IP Logged

Just to break this whole French stereotype thing over the past few pages: I've never experienced anything like this in French, and I have spent several weeks at a time in Normandy, Brittany, the Loire Valley, Alsace, Burgundy, Champagne, and Paris, in addition to driving across the much of the country, and living in Brittany for 2,5 years. People have always been very pleasant and extremely happy to hear broken French (mine or my mother's, back in the day, and now my husband's). People extremely rarely switch to English if you have an accent or fail to find the words. Sometimes they'll ask if you speak French (idiotic question, perhaps, since I've often been speaking it for several minutes at that point), and when I say yes, carry on in French. I have "only" been coming to France since 1992, though, and some of your experiences may no doubt pre-date mine.

When it comes to Paris, my experience is that people working in restaurants and hotels in touristy areas are happy to speak English to you, but if you carry on in French they will too. When my husband and I do touristy things here in Brittany, at most they've asked us (edit: in French) if we want brochures in French or English.

It's not like that 100% of the time, but almost. We've met a few veterinarians who insisted on speaking English to us even though we responded in French. I also had a bank appointment screwed up by a receptionist who instead of setting up a meeting with the branch manager, the only person who could approve a mortgage for business-owners like ourselves, like we specifically requested, set us up with the clerk in charge of welcoming British people to France and setting up their first bank accounts.

Edited by eyðimörk on 04 January 2014 at 10:01pm

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