My experience, although 20ish years ago now, was that France was very accommodating to people who were trying to make an effort to speak French, however badly, and would help correct pronunciations and other little errors, whereas their patience for foreigners who thought that the locals English would get better if they just spoke more loudly and slowly was thin.

> France is not very accommodating to non French speaking foreigners. Trying to get around in life with just English there outside of Paris is not easy.

I don't really get this kind of comments... Usually people also say the same thing when visiting Japan. "This restaurant only has menu in Japanese and staff only speaking Japanese!!".

That's true a bit everywhere in the world, isn't it? In the US, apart from places with say huge Spanish speaking presence, you better interact in English.

Try "getting around in life" using only say French, or Portuguese, or Japanese in a random US city like Portland, NYC, or Chicago.

I didn't sense any judgement there, just a statement of fact. Learning a new language as an adult is doable, but not trivial, so it's certainly a factor in making a decision to relocate to another country for a job.

> That's true a bit everywhere in the world, isn't it?

No it's not, western Europe for example has a bunch of countries where English is almost as good as native. But obviously that's not the common case across the world, and like you say there's nothing wrong with expecting people to know the local language.

>That's true a bit everywhere in the world, isn't it?

That has not been my experience. I'm not arguing it should be this way, but for better or worse I've gotten by very well with english virtually anywhere with tourists and most places without. I lived in east ukraine for two years and learned russian - enough people spoke english there that at times it could be hard to get practice time in russian. This was with a younger student crowd, most non-students and older people did not speak english, but the point stands that you can find english speaking people and get by in most situations.

Not really, the world isn't either black or white but various shades of gray. Everything North of Benelux is a lot friendlier and open to speaking English and doing things in English outside of capitals, compared to places like France where not speaking it gives you a severe handicap in life and career.

There are quite a few employees in Toulouse that don't speak French, the company is very international. That being said I agree that daily life is much easier if you speak at least a little bit.

That's funny you say that because my experience of France is that everyone outside of Paris seems to hate the Parisians more than me, an American.