> My experience is that it’s mostly cultural, and often comes down to whether the person you’re speaking to has themself had to try using a foreign language, thus gaining the empathy to help you out.
I think another part is how much diversity there is in speakers of the language and the common dialects.
Because of all that linguistic variety, if you're an English or Spanish speaker you're generally more accustomed to hearing different pronunciations of your own language day to day than French speakers are (on average, YMMV, etc).
I lived in Romania at one point, where this was even more obvious. There are comparatively few distinct dialects of Romanian, and most Romanians have never heard non-native speakers speaking their language, so no matter how friendly they were, understanding unusual (OK, wrong) pronunciation was just not a common skill.
Eh, France also has a number of languages that are distinctly not French. But it also has a long history of being a heavily centralized state where everything revolves around Paris, and other languages/dialects were ruthlessly suppressed for a long time.
I think another part is how much diversity there is in speakers of the language and the common dialects.
For example, there's a very large number of Spanish speakers worldwide with a very wide variety of accents and dialects, plus large numbers of non-native speakers. That also applies to English, but doesn't apply so much to French (not that there's zero variety, but compare the content of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_dialects_and_varieties, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dialects_of_English and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varieties_of_French).
Because of all that linguistic variety, if you're an English or Spanish speaker you're generally more accustomed to hearing different pronunciations of your own language day to day than French speakers are (on average, YMMV, etc).
I lived in Romania at one point, where this was even more obvious. There are comparatively few distinct dialects of Romanian, and most Romanians have never heard non-native speakers speaking their language, so no matter how friendly they were, understanding unusual (OK, wrong) pronunciation was just not a common skill.