Re: amazon to move to eire because of bliar's education, education, education...
- From: Stephen Glynn <stephen.glynn@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 07 Mar 2006 16:17:44 GMT
Au wrote:
In article <ly0Pf.26308$gB4.12121@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Stephen Glynn <stephen.glynn@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:It's a silly attitude. I've always worked on the principle that, even though I know we're going to end up speaking in English, I'm going to get a lot further if I display some basic good manners by at least making the effort to say something in the other chap's language. After all, I'm expecting him to make the effort of speaking my language.
I do this too, and have to say that when you're on holiday, it's kind of embarressing speaking in English and not even attempting a word in the other country language, even if they do speak a little / better English then the English.
Having said that, from my experience, the Belgians (in French or Dutch), Dutch, and Germans are not too fussed if you pronouce something wrong, or get the male / female of an object mixed up. The French however are full of it and will either ask you to repeat what you said, laugh that despite French not being your first language and you're actually making an effort - you got it wrong, or just feign ignorance.
Not my experience of the French, I have to say. My spoken French is reasonable, but I know I make plenty of grammatical mistakes, particularly for the first couple of days I'm in France. I've always found people there seem pretty tolerant of my efforts to speak their language.
On the subject of the Dutch (and Dutch-speaking Belgians), a South African friend of mine told me that on his first visit to Belgium, he heard some people speaking Flemish in a bar and thought 'Great, this is just like Afrikaans' (he's an English-speaking South African, but he had to learn Afrikaans at school) so started talking to them in what he took to be their language. He tells me they fell about laughing, not at his attempts but because Afrikaans apparently sounds so weird to speakers of any other version of Dutch (I think the Dutch term for it translates as 'baby Dutch').
Sometimes, of course, people are too polite. I spent quite a bit of time in Russia on business, and picked up a bit of the language as I went along. I then thought I'd better do some formal language classes and discovered that I'd been completely mangling it but the Russians had been so pleasantly surprised a foreigner was making a bit of an effort to speak to them in their own language they were too polite to correct me. I'm told it's rather similar in Arab countries, since as there are so many different dialects of Arabic, when you make mistakes people just tend to assume you're just speaking a dialect they haven't heard before.
Steve
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