I think the subtle thing missed here is the effort required to speak a second language well is not worth the effort. Just scraping by is good enough especially if you still have access to your first language. Why speak French well when for a fraction of the effort speaking poorly gets you 90% of the return.
> Why speak French well when for a fraction of the effort speaking poorly gets you 90% of the return.
Because that last 10% (which is actually more like the last 99%) is the part where you actually create friends, relationships, and connect with other people beyond "how are you?" And people actually start inviting you to social gatherings again because you can keep up in conversation even though your new-foreign-guy appeal wears off. And when you meet a cute girl, you can actually hold her attention and interest and feel fulfilled after the honeymoon stage wears off, and you don't just conjure up questions like "so how long is she gonna last with this foreign play-thing?" when you visit her friends and family. And you stop feeling like a fucking outsider all the time.
Your post is the same bullshit I told myself when I moved abroad and didn't actually want to put much effort into learning the language. It won't get you as far as you think.
The issue for the OA author is she has her family in France so she can speak English.
I am not trying to suggest it is not a good idea to learn to speak the language well in the country you live, just that the effort can be out of proportion to the benefit if you are surrounded by people who speak your native language.
People who rely on wit and charm as their social lubricant need it.
I remember one place I worked had an exchange program between labs, we had a French girl in ours who seemed very shy and withdrawn, but the colleague who'd been to the French lab the year before (and was fluent in French) said she was an absolute riot and the soul of any party in France.
Very few french folks who live in France like to speak any other language, regardless of their objective level. Those who went abroad are better in this. The excuse is always the same - "my level is not so good" - which is mostly not true, they are perfectly understandable and speak fine. Maybe they don't like their accent, but this is not any blocker for a good conversation.
Very personal experience for past 8 years - living 2km from French border, surrounded by them day and night.
I was watching a basic italian video last weekend as I'm visiting Tuscany soon and the teacher made an excellent point that vocab matters so much more than grammar to begin with.
We'd all understand 'I the toilet need', and most languages have about 1000 everyday words, so just learn them and you'll be able to make yourself understood, don't worry about the grammar too much to begin with, or not at all if you're just travelling there.
Perhaps not so true of some languages, but certainly most Romantic and Germanic ones.
But we make up for it with our good looks and sporting ability! /s
While "charm" may not fit the stereotype of an HNer, I'd guess we're more likely than average to rely on communication to make a good impression. I, as an immigrant, certainly feel that I'm handicapped because humour and interesting conversation are all I have to offer on a first date!
If you live somewhere long-term not speaking the local language well will pose more subtle barriers even though you could still buy bread in the bakery. It really makes you feel like you don't belong (in a way you don't) and are not "home".
Looking back at my years of failure at French in school I get the impression that French does not lend itself particularly well to scraping by. Any form of rudimentary word-uuuhm-by-hrmmm-word rendering of French is so far removed from actual French (and noticeably so even to the uninitiated, which might be the key difference), that it's hard to find your "scrapping by voice". Objectively harder than in many other languages I think.
Yes one of the thing us native english speakers forget is how easy it is to speak English badly and get by - with many other languages unless you have a good grasp of the language nobody has any idea what you are trying to say.
Maybe there is more to the dominance of the English language than just British and American pop music, movies and empires. Relatively high functionality at low skill levels should be the main quality metric for a common secondary language. English ranks terribly in consistency between spelling and pronunciation, but maybe selecting the wrong mapping rule for a word isn't quite as damaging to communication as over might expect. But I'm biased myself, as a native speaker of German I am clearly on the winning side of English dominance: just add the French half of the vocabulary, the rest is almost a dialect.
