That's totally a cliche. Everywhere in the world you can meet people that : 1. Only speak their native language. 2. Speak several languages but not yours. 3. Speak your language but are assholes. 4. Speak your language but are afraid of talking because they are afraid of sounding ridiculous. 5. Are very happy to speak your language. 6. Hate your country for absurd reasons. 7. Love your country for absurd reasons.

Nowadays young frenchs learn english by overexposition to the language through various medias (school is of no help) and in the past, even if english was taught at school, I think the majority of them didn't learn it properly beyond "my taylor is rich", "The cat is happy" and "I love you".

I didn't "learn" english and it is a mystery why I can express myself and understand others in this language, I guess I have been overexposed to the language when I was young.

That said, I worked in museums at a time in my life and was actually surprised by the huge amount of people travelling in the world with no knowledge of the language of the country they are in, expecting everybody to be able to talk their language like if it was universal, be them italians, frenchs, americans, chinese or whatever.

In my experience as a tourist, you can skip the fluent part.

But the quantity of smiles goes up 300% when you talk to them in bad French with finger pointing as opposed to fluent English, even in tourist trap areas.

Maybe slightly better service too.

Edit: hey HN, can we have the option to post one anonymous coward comment every couple days from our regular accounts? We're going to run out of throwawayNNNNNN ids sooner or later.

Quand vous voyagez chez nous, vous vous rendriez service en faisant un premier pas en français. C'est une marque de respect que nous apprécions beaucoup, même si la suite de l'échange se fait en anglais.