In contradiction to the conventional wisdom about the snooty French, the crabbiest European I met was an Italian. I was in a museum somewhere in Tuscany and needed to use the toilet. I figured I could pull off a beautiful version of “where is the bathroom?” without any problem, so I went up to one of the docents and asked, “Dove è il gabinetto?” He didn’t even look up at me, but contemptuously responded, in pretty clear English, “What are you trying to say?” Oh, well. Every other Italian was wonderful.
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This video with as mean spirited as it was could only have been made by an Englishman.
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When my sister was in France as an exchange student, she said her host parent had particular trouble with the English word “clothes.”
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clozziz? simple!
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“Beetle”. I tried to teach a French person to say “Beetle”. After 30 mins we were at “Beat. Le.” and I awarded half points.
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Jackie Jormp Jomp was a pretty good movie, too
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With only one or two exceptions, that’s been my experience too, although if they are comfortable in English most francophones will politely switch rather than watch me struggle.
edit: Oops. Meant to reply to @GulliverFoyle.
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As a native English speaker, saying “toy boat” three times fast always defeats me. Now I wonder if there are speakers of other languages who wouldn’t have any difficulty with phrases that are tongue twisters in English.
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I have fond memories of playing this game with my French / German side of the family, they equally got the treasured chance to quiz us on our poor Euro language skills.
Fun times.
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Still not as good as that video of Germans trying to say “squirrel”
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since Italians when you don’t understand them just try speaking louder and slower you you should have tried that with him
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My own nickname throughout high school, and the nicknames of at least a couple of my classmates, were borne of our 7th grade French teacher totally mangling our real names’ pronunciation on the first day of class.
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One unfortunate classmate was named Geoff, which, on taking roll call the first day, she pronounced, “… Goof?” It stuck for six years, after which he moved far away.
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I’m fortunate that most of my Chinese colleagues speak some degree of English. They invariably say they their English is terrible, but compared to my Chinese, they are darn good.
When we do hit a spot where I’m teaching a new English word and how to pronounce, I find myself referring to the root language for guidance (both meaning and pronunciation). Which led to the personal realization that English is difficult because it’s not one language.
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But that they stumble on “choir” suggests that they are hamming it up, un peu?
I thought their pronunciations on that were completely reasonable - trying a French-based pronunciation and one based on how it’s spelled, based on English rules (ha ha). If you’ve not heard the word spoken before, pronouncing “choir” ko-eye-er isn’t the least bit obvious. The word may derive from French, but it sounds nothing like either the root word, “quer,” nor the modern French equivalent of that word, “choeur,” nor is that connection obvious by the spelling.
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Like I said, the Italians were usually wonderful. On that same trip I was waiting for a train in Rome. I was trying to order, in my garbled Italian, something at the little station cafe and I’d say about half the other waiting passengers came over to help me out. So I was taken by surprise by the rude docent. Who know? Maybe he was having a bad day.
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or “rural juror” in a US Southern accent:
“ru’ul ju’ur” : )
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My wife was asking me the other day to pronounce the difference between “hell” vs. “hail” and I just started laughing because I realized that with a certain southern accent they can sound identical.
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both languages suffer a similar problem: neither language wants to be pronounced as spelled. The problems the people in the video had are the same problems all we native speakers had in grade school. The French suffer from an unwillingness to pronounce the consonants at the end of their words.
I will say, as an anglophone with 2 years of crappy high-school French under his belt, that English is the champ of bad spelling phonetics, though.
Unrelated to the above: Harlem is not an English word, it is a Dutch place-name that I think we actually mostly pronounce as Dutch. Certainly much more accurately than the French place-names “Detroit” or (New) “Orleans.”
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