It's complicated. I think they would love to, but many don't understand french unless it's perfect, and they can get upset about faux pas made by foreigners without realizing it's tied to a high degree of mastering the language—address them without saying bonjour first and they might get offended. On the other side they often seem self aware about speaking English so many try to avoid it. But none of these things should be interpreted as a lack of interest—my impression is that many of the people it's hard to get through to would genuinely love to talk to people from all over the world. They just struggle to get to that point.

[–] rumschlumpel@feddit.org 8 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

What I want to know is, why do the French seem to struggle with this so much more than native speakers of other languages? And I bet that on average, tourists in France speak way better French than tourists in, say, Germany speak German, not because it's easier but because French is a very common second/third language, especially for the kinds of people who go travelling/sightseeing in Europe.

[–] cabbage@piefed.social 4 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

French pronounciation is pretty tricky, and French is a very standardized language. So most places you go to in France, at least of bigger cities, people speak French very similarly to in Paris. People are not used to hearing variations.

German is a germanic language of course, which is the same as English. So if you speak English you already know one language in the same language family, and your guess of pronouncing it will be better than when you attempt French coming from the same skill level. Germans are also used to amny strange dialects - while many struggle with the Swiss and certain Austrians, most have heard it enough to make it work. So that might help them.

That said, there's individual variation, and English speakers are unusually good at understanding variations of English as everybody hears all kinds of English all the time. Many europeans struggle a lot more to understand foreigners doing their best to pronounce their language—it's not just the French.

That's my theories on the matter, anyway!

[–] DV8@lemmy.world 4 points 3 days ago

This is totally not my experience at all. Parisian French as a "standard" is literally reviled by many people. And it's usually not the exact same in the other departments. Let alone what is spoken colloquially. In Dijon in the Bourgogne-Comté department French pronunciation is extremely different from that of the Parisian accent. For a non-native French speaker from Belgium it literally even feels like how French is spoken in Wallonie. Same thing in Lyon or Rennes.

And if we include the overseas departments it's even more so of course. That difference is bigger than Flemish Dutch and Holland's Dutch.