From anecdotal evidence, French is a very fragile language: The slightest deviation in grammar or pronunciation renders the language utterly incomprehensible.
Example 1: The wife of my friend the rocket scientist studied French in school and loved all things French. He agreed to go on a bicycle tour of France with her. (This is known in the business as being a good husband.)
As they cycled past a small town, they spotted an ice cream stand. My friend was volunteered to be the one to buy the ice cream. He approached the woman and said, “Une vanille et une chocolat, s’il vous plaît.“
The women sternly reprimanded him with a pointed finger. “Ce n’est pas français.” (“That’s not French.”)
My friend collected his thoughts and gave it another try. “Une vanille et une chocolat, s’il vous plaît.“
The woman gave the same reply. “Ce n’est pas français.“
He returned to his wife, who had been observing the transaction from afar. She asked, “What did you say to her? … And what did she say? … That should have worked. Let me try.”
His wife approached the woman and said, “Une de vanille et une de chocolat, s’il vous plaît.“
The woman looked right at my friend and punctuated her statement with an accusatory finger: “Une de vanille et une de chocolat!“
Example 2: One of my friends grew up in the English-speaking portion of Canada but learned French as part of the standard academic curriculum. During a trip to France, he got caught in an unexpected downpour and found a shop that had umbrellas. He went to the lady at the desk and asked to buy a “parapluie” (umbrella).
The woman could not understand what it was he wanted to buy.
He repeated his offer to buy a “parapluie“.
Once again, the woman did not understand what it was he wanted. My friend left the shop empty-handed.
My friend later checked his pronunciation with some native French speakers. Apparently, he did not pronounce the second “p” with a strong enough puff of air. This tiny mistake rendered the word completely incomprehensible. The contextual clues of a rainstorm were apparently of no use whatsoever.
Example 3: One of my friends grew up as a native French speaker in Canada¹ (though he is now a United States citizen). He was on vacation in France and observed at the next table some Japanese tourists trying desperately to place their order in French. They consulted their phrase book and did their best to ask for some water. “Eeeooouuuuu?” Unfortunately, Japanese vowels and French vowels do not line up perfectly, and the waiter professed that he was completely unable to understand what they were trying to say.
Example 4: One of my colleagues went to school in Montreal, so he speaks French reasonably well. He was at a restaurant in France, and he asked to see the wine list, “la liste des vins.“
The waiter was perplexed and replied in French that he didn’t understand what my friend said.
My colleague repeated his request to see “la liste de vin,” and the waiter once against apologized in the most polite terms possible for his inability to derive any comprehensible meaning from the seemingly random stream of syllables emanating from my colleague’s mouth.
My colleague rephrased his request, asking to see, you know, the piece of paper that enumerates all the wines available for purchase so that it may be consumed in conjunction with the meal.
And then a grand epiphany struck the waiter, and he dramatically announced, “Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. La carte des vins!“
My conclusion from these stories is that French is a very fragile language.
The Académie Française is the organization in France which is vested with official authority for matters relating to the French language. It was formally established on February 22, 1635. Happy birthday, Académie Française. Maybe you can work on making your language a little less fragile.
¹ He tells me that as a child, he learned English by watching He Man and the Masters of the Universe.
I think in these situations, you simply say in your best French you can:
“Soyez arrogant, mais sans les anglophones, vous parleriez allemand, pas français.”
In Rome we once asked for bruschetta as if it were spelled “bruscetta”. The waiter repeated our mispronounced order, adding “subito!”, and then brought us just what we wanted.
In Normandy, I asked a café waitress for “un crêpe” rather than “une crêpe”, which is rather funny if you think about it, but she pretended not to understand me at all.
On visits to France i find starting with “Bonjour” followed by “pardon” and the rest in English seems to work. If they blank you say “pute de con” or “putain” and walk away.
*Example 4 (not 3)
I haven't been here in years. I was looking at a blog post about "Environment Variable Expansion" I found in a batch file. Funny that I would come across this post. Is that third story about Andrew C? Did he tell you himself? (I remember he would tell everybody that story - it's a good story).
Thanks for the trip down memory lane. And RIP Andrew.
Btw, this reminds me about something that one of my English teacher in secondary school told us about when being asked "why we're told to use different words and not repeating the use if possible? Is that just to show off you know a lot of vocabularies?"
When talking in English, since lots of English words carry more than one different meaning, it help to use different vocabularies to convey the same idea to people who...
On “parapluie”: if the “p” is not aspirated, one might mistake it for a “b” instead, so it could become “parabluie”.
On “une vanille et une chocolat”: I can see this comes from “a vanilla (one) and a chocolate (one)”, but “une chocolat” would sound really weird, because “chocolat” is a masculine noun. (“Une vanille” sounds fine.)
The “p” was aspirated. It just wasn’t aspirated *enough*.
The confusion in example 2 is at least understandable. If the second syllable of "parapluie" is reduced enough, it sounds like "par lui" which means "by him." So the person in the shop could have heard "I want to buy a by him."
But this sort of thing isn't specific to French; mispronouncing a word or using an unfamiliar word can impair communication, no matter what the language. I can recall seeing programming...
A few salient points:
• Some people, French or not, are douche-bags who intentionally pretend to not understand when others, particularly foreigners, say something that isn't perfect.
• The French have a reputation of being quite snooty.
• When it's clear that someone isn't a native speaker, a reasonable person will compensate by trying to pull an IE and decode the intended meaning anyway.
I've known people who had accents and encountered English speakers who couldn't or...
My anecdotal experience is very much the opposite. As a beginner I had talked in completely broken sentences and even made up words by doing a Frenchy pronunciation of words in English, and very rarely did people have trouble understanding what I wanted to say.
Example 1 seems like a snobby woman who wanted to be a 4th grade teacher, not an actual problem with understanding.
Example 3 might be because they were trying to...
I second other commenters about the ice cream scenario (sentence seems fine).
Regarding the Academie Francaise, luckily it has more pretention than actual authority on the language. They make up words and rules which people happily disregard 😛