Learning French while exploring West Africa was enormously good fun. For most people it's their 3rd or 4th or 5th language, and they were always so full of joy and happiness than I was trying my best. Nobody ever corrected my pronunciation or criticized me for my bad grammar and lack of vocabulary. (Cough, France, Cough). Thanks to all the encouragement and positivity I picked it up pretty quickly, and thoroughly enj…
French people always get criticized for not understanding foreigners' broken French. It is not out of malice. It is because it actually is very hard to understand broken French. A lot of very different words sound similar. A very simple grammatical mistake can completely change the meaning of a sentence. And yeah, it's probably kind of the same in English, but French is not the linga franca English is today (see what…
First of all, french is not some beautiful language once you grok the grammar, rather pretty weird and old layered 'spaghetti code' with tons of exceptions to tons of obscure rules (nothing, absolutely nothing elegant there). Its needlessly complex especially when you know other languages solved it much better, and as with other bureaucratic stuff in France any attempt for reform failed. English to non-native (in both of those) is a beautiful magnificent blessing in comparison, you can be proficient with little, french will literally look puzzled at you and get really quickly fed up with you. Patience is really not a typical french virtue. But I guess if you like the feeling of struggling for whole life, looked down upon and gain motivation from it then its great.
Second, I don't know details of how schools work in France (seems a rather toxic place pushing way too hard for competitiveness but I may be wrong here), but I see result every day also in cca 50% of my colleagues - people are absolutely snobbish in the worst possible manner about their language to the point of being sometimes toxic, and automatically scowl at any tiny mistake. Guess what, as a foreigner trying to learn language you will make tons of them, even on C2 level. There is absolutely minimum help, they will just laugh at you like bunch of small kids, literally mocking you and pointing fingers at you. I mean 50+ years old higher managers bursting into laugh how stupid you are. Every single time. Schooling and overall mindset make french people behave like arrogant folks a lot (not so much say folks from African colonies, much much nicer folks to interact with; same for Swiss french and cca Belgians too. Don't know much about Quebec folks, but in casual conversation french mock and insult them behind their back pretty horribly). I've never ever been mocked by natives for making even basic mistakes in any other language, its just part of basic human decency.
I've seen recently shock and disgust among young French that some french local paragliding teacher exposed to decades of english-speaking tourists used some english words in his french. Those were some otherwise smart folks. I've had my very good American friend who is overweight literally gave up on french and France, on his month long trip there they were insulting and mocking him in the bars and restaurants, in hotels, in trains etc (I talk about staff, not other tourists). Man, I have hundreds of stories like this, unfortunately very consistent.
I know 5 languages, 3 of them very different compared to my native one, and French is by far the worst of them to learn and just use it (I know there are worse, just describing my experiences). French folks need to come in terms of not being superpower nor center of the world anymore and accepting there is more than their language in the world. I've visited every continent (apart from Antarctica) and generally travelled a lot and literally nowhere I felt so little welcomed and rather just tolerated due to money bringing in like in France. A truly beautiful place, history, cuisine, nature, but neither me, nor my wife (who studied in Lyon for quite some time) nor folks around us in similar situation certainly don't travel there for the local people, which is often the most important aspect of my traveling when going for exotics.
/sorry for long rant