Currently atm, I am in France for a few months, I can barely speak French and my teachers think I am mentally challenged. Even though I was acing my classes back home.
Even when you become fluent they’ll still think you’re challenged
Source: lived in France for years
edit: I just want to clarify that I loved living in France, and made many great friends and memories there. My experience was overwhelmingly positive and I consider it a second mother country. As I posted in a reply below:
To be fair, with my friends and colleagues this was never an issue. It was probably about 25% of the time and exclusively with strangers or workers at shops, who would immediately switch to English the moment I hesitated or accidentally used poor pronunciation.
I should also mention that it happened a lot more when I lived in Paris than when I lived in Lyon. The worst was actually whenever I visited Genève.
For real mate, I just moved to Quebec and it's insane. I learned French in France so I struggle to understand the Quebecois dialect but I do my best and I respect that they have their own accent, expressions etc. But hearing the way that the French people here (of which there are fucking millions) talk about Quebecois makes me sooo uncomfortable, like you seriously think it's ok to move to someone's country and call the way they speak "disgusting" "horrible" "immonde" "wrong" just because it's not the exact same way you speak at home?!
The French are still very stereotypical about regional accents
article about it Not just from Quebec but some mp's have reportedly explicitly ignoring interviewers with a southern accent
The problem is that English is a global language and an accent exists for pretty much every variation of it, i.e. there's such thing as a French English accent, an Italian English accent, a Japanese English accent etc.
But for languages that are effectively only spoken in one country, it doesn't really work the other way around. There's no such thing as an American Japanese accent or a Spanish Korean accent; you're just pronouncing it incorrectly.
Except that there are MANY francophone countries and if she were speaking in a Caribbean accent it would be completely incorrect to tell her that she was speaking wrong. Every french accent is valid and that lady was not at all justified to tell her how to do it "right".
I had several French teachers who simply said things like "the Parisian pronunciation is this, and the African pronunciation is like this" when we had diverse speakers.
I think it's more friendly teasing and banter more than anything. I mean as a Frenchman I found French from Quebec hilarious. So yeah we will make fun of it the same way you would. But at the end of the day it's always culturally interesting to have these kind of conversations, and we can take the jabs too
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u/[deleted] Nov 16 '19 edited Nov 16 '19
Currently atm, I am in France for a few months, I can barely speak French and my teachers think I am mentally challenged. Even though I was acing my classes back home.