My nipples explode with delight.

For me it's usually been more like they refuse to understand unless your pronounciation is perfect. Not everybody, of course, but it's happened often. So I ended up focusing on learning other languages instead.

Then again, my worst experience was in the UK. My first time there, I went to a pub and ordered a beer:

"One beer, please"
"What?"
"One beer"
"What?"
"(raising one finger) ONE (pointing at the tap) BEER"
"Ah, one beer" (With a slightly longer ee)

Ok, I can pronounce it as bad as you want, but I'm on a pub right in front of the tap. What can I possibly be asking for? A bee? A bear? A coffee? And don't try to convince me that you live in London and aren't used to foreign pronunciation, speacially if you are the barman of a pub right below a youth hostel!

Kaikki on hyvin niin kauan kunnes joku älyää vaatia monikielistä GOG-foorumia.

(käyttäkää google-kääntäjää, nartut!)

Wow, I hadn't noticed that yet, thanks!

Belgium is not France, even the Wallonian part of it. Oh, and every Walloon must speak Flemish, considering it's one of the 2 official languages of the country, and mandatory in school. It's just that for stupid reasons of regional pride they refuse to speak it, just like there are many people in Flanders who'll ignore you if you try to speak to them in French, at least until you explain you're actually French and not Walloon (true story, it happened to me often enough when I visited Flanders, to the point when I eventually switched to English).

Personally, almost every younger French person I've met spoke English decently.
Of course, if you try to speak English to people 50 year old and older, who went to school before English was required and at a time when German was actually valued more than English as a foreign language, suffice it to say they won't know much if any English.

It's not surprising really, considering that at the time French people could reasonably expect to never need to speak any language other than French.

I repeat, I was being purposefully acting a little ignorant in that post but... as a matter of fact I have. Just recently two French guys were holding up everyone at a kebab place here in Warsaw because they didn't get what the lady at the cash register was saying. Approximately thirty years old, some businessmen wearing suits. People tried Polish and English but ultimately I had to help out with my awful French skills. Of course I'm not saying that all French people have such a bad understanding of any foreign language but it did kinda support that stereotype.

Also I participated in a student exchange program between a German and a French school as did many of my friends, some younger some older than me. In all cases it was the same scenario - when the French students came to Germany everyone had to speak French. When it was the Germans' turn to go to France everyone had to speak French. And when Germans had trouble expressing themselves in French trying some English wasn't really helping, I remember many situations where I (and other German students) had to try really hard with our basic French skills at the cost of being laughed at by the French students. Ironically it was my exchange student's dad who made it possible for me at all to resort to German or English when I had trouble expressing myself in French at dinner with them.

Again, I know that these are only personal experiences (although I did hear similar stories from students from other schools and even countries) but I think that it is true to some degree that French people's willingness to learn another language is generally smaller than in case of many other European countries which probably has some comprehensible cultural and linguistic reasons (for example I do believe that having French as a first language makes it a little harder to learn additional languages than say with German as a first language). I really hope that you don't take this as an offensive statement and I know that many French people speak other languages very well. It's sometimes really hard discussing that kind of thing without drifting off into stereotypes and getting accused of things...

My experience was that speaking Finnish to many French people got my point across the best. If I spoke my broken French, I got funny looks and was laughed at. If I spoke English, quite many would simply refuse to talk to me and some would even become a bit hostile.

Speaking Finnish to them seemed to take them completely off-guard, and I usually got what I wanted by pointing to things etc.

Then again, some people seemed quite fine speaking English to us, e.g. the hotel manager and waiters at the hotel.

Lol, yeah. My experience exactly. :D

I'll use the safest option - No way lol

Lol, it instantly reminded me of this. :D

I know Belgium is not France, I can be real nitpicky with national borders, but I thought it was good to illustrate the point since I knew it better. But if you want to restrict to France, whenever I go visit a friend of mine who lives in Paris sharing a house with local young people (meaning, below 30), it's always French or no communication. I know France has an English subject as foreign language, as does Spain and (I believe) Japan or Korea, but in any of these countries most people have hardly ever actually used it and will feel very lost if they are suddenly forced to use it as the only way to communicate with another person. That's pretty much factual in Spain, and it's the feeling I've gotten in France as well. And btw, they often speak better Spanish than English.

Not Norway, Finland!

Haha, I often have similar experiences when I resort to Basque. Cheers for the randomly strange languages!

I'm not offended that easily, don't worry. If anything, this kind of thing makes me slightly ashamed of my countrymen.

But frankly, I don't quite understand how young French people could NOT speak English at all. Not only is it mandatory, but it's usually emphasized by schools that being able to speak English is huge plus these days. I know that when I was at school, everybody had a decent grasp of English, not great by any means.

We even had a few English exchange students once, and nobody ridiculed them for their poor French or refused to switch to English if they really couldn't get their point across.