French are rudest, most boring people on earth: poll

bon jour! the reason americans dislike the french is: (drumroll) we can not believe that citizens of another country could be more self absorbed than we are.

But just to drive everyone here nuts, if you can speak adequate French, they do warm up, and even become friendly. For some reason I can't explain I made good use of my High School's language lab (probably to get into University) and made good progress, partly because I discovered that if you have a good ear for music, languages become easier to learn. Eventually I got tolerably good and was able to master a few of the refinements like the proper way to pronounce the french R. Try saying Jean Paul Sartre a few thousand times and you can get there. It's a curious vibration at the back of the throat. If you can whip a good French R on someone there, you'd be surprised how they warm up to you. Of course there are drawbacks and regional accents that can drive you crazy. I never knew it until I moved to Canada, but Quebec french is essentially the french of Normandy. In Quebec it is called joual (zhoo-all) because that is how they pronounce cheval (shev-al) which means horse. They have contractions and skip words all over the place "Chu pas" means "je ne suis pas" (I am not), it's a nightmare. In France with my Language Lab time quite fresh, I was constantly mistaken for native French from some other district or at the very least, the child of French parents. I got to see and do things that were off limits for tourists because the French really don't care how they are perceived by outsiders, they don't put themselves out for anybody unless they speak relatively decent French. The Gare d'Orsay, a former train station that has now become one of the world's great art galleries, not least because it is the largest single collection of Impressionist art, had just ceased being a train station when I got to Paris. I'd read so many books (in English, I didn't then and don't really enjoy reading novels in French though I can still bash my way through a newspaper) where the protagonists left from or arrived at the Gare d'Orsay that I went there and had a long talk with the policeman who at the end of 20 minutes of flannel actually called one of the security guards out to escort me round the inside. It's one of those great monuments to the 19th century, all cast iron columns and curved trusses and acres and acres of glass. It really was a privilege to see, and still is only it'll cost you admission now, but now it has all those great paintings and new decoration and no rust left to speak of.

There are odd little covered areas in Britain too, because frost is so rare. Right across the road from Southwark Cathedral is an open storage area with cast iron pillars and a glass roof, really heavy wire netting for walls, that's it, oh, and a good lock on the door that looks like it came from the original pirates of the Caribbean on the door. Most of the locks in Britain look like they belong on treasure chests, the ones we're familiar with where the catch pops up are rare there, they all hinge open.

If you do speak French reasonably well, and you want to be really confused, go to the South of France, Provence, and the adjoining provinces that make up the Midi, a purely French term for their south. The accent is like French put through an Italian and then a Spanish translation machine and fed back out to you. When they write it, it's French, when they speak it, it's gibberish. Even native French speakers get lost. Add to thatthe fact that Provencal or rather Occitan really is a different language, half way to Spanish, and that around Bayonne and Hendaye they speak Basque which resembles nothing, literally. It is an appendix of a language from a source which has died out entirely. It is probably pre-Celtic Iberian, which pushes it back about 2500 to 3000 years. It has no relatives anywhere.

At least Finno-Ugric which covers Finland Estonia and Hungary is related to Mongol dialects and northern Chinese.

Gaelic has Irish, revived in the 19th and 20th Century, Scots Gaelic still spoken and slowly reviving in the islands, Welsh never gone away, and being vigorously encouraged in the schools, and Breton which is as vigorously persecuted a language which has made it all the stronger in France. It is reasonably closely tied to both Nordic and Old German, so it is well integrated, and probably ineradicable. I'm hoping that the new devolved Scottish parliament will take the same attitude as the Welsh and put it into the schools from the earliest grades so that it will revive and prosper. For a while in the 1920's and 30's there were more Gaelic speakers in Canada on Cape Breton Island and northern Nova Scotia than there were in Scotland.

The truth is that Belgians, even if you speak decent French can be more of a pain than the French. Germans I generally got along with, by trying to speak German. I still (honestly) get compliments on my German accent, but that's that musical ear coming into play again. What German I learned, I learned while travelling there. But that old standby the "Sleeping Dictionary" helped a lot, and a lovely girl she was too.

Rob

...and everyone I encountered was very nice, despite their reputation for rudeness. What can I say. Maybe as a New Yorker I have a different standard, LOL.

Now if you polled to find the most anti-Semitic countries on earth, I would not be at all surprised to see France near the top of the list.

had a wonderful time in Paris.

Ro had a fling with a Frenchman, and Carmela was drooling over the food, loved the architecture, and was waiting on baited breath, for the Frenchmen to speak to her in French.