London Banter - View Single Post

tim... · August 29th 17, 03:29 PM posted to uk.transport.london

wrote in message
...
In article , (Clank)
wrote:

On 29.08.2017 2:50 AM, wrote:
I take French as a bit exceptional because at least in theory almost all
of us are supposed to have learnt it at school.

It's a bit of a mystery why it's taught in school, given it's about the
least useful language to learn. Not so much because of the level of use,
but rather because the native speakers would rather sniff haughtily than
descend to the level of communicating with anyone less than perfectly
fluent in it...

It's taught in school because France is our largest near neighbour and the
single foreign country with which this country has interacted down the
centuries. Young people like you have been spoilt by the ease of travel in
recent times. Few people used to travel at all and many got no further
than
France in the days before cheap air travel. It's only 50 years ago after
all. French was also the universally accepted international language and
language of diplomacy until the Internet enabled (American) English to
sweep
all before it.

As for your ludicrous claim about the attitude of the French to others
speaking French, it is, in my experience, utter tosh. In any case it is
nonsense to make such a generalisation about any population of over 100
million people worldwide.

I must say that, when visiting places, I was surprised how far it was into
the conversation before I got "rumbled".

It was only when they started on some complicated instructions for visiting
that I had to ask them to converse in English :-(

tim