The Trouble with France is......

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Where I live in France that sounds more like a city!

My nearest town (5 miles away) has 500 inhabitants.

"je ne parle pas français" - thus proving my point...

Sorry, I learned Spanish in school (and around here, it's beacoup more useful... Nothing wrong with French - I lifted that quote out of Catch-22...;)

Parisians speak French, the rest of the world suffers from varying degrees of mispronunciation and bad grammar...

I made up the first quote (almost), from hearing a radio interview years ago when France did something 'wrong' (I don't remember what, it's nigh on 20 years ago) and some young thang blurted out..."But we have so much to teach the world!" - not makin' it up...

but the attitude...that's hard to mistake...

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i like france and french things, even though i don't speak a lick of this beautiful language. this said, both america [during gwb's 2 evil terms] and europe [including france! ;+) ] have politicians for whom it could be said, "il pète plus haut que son cul."
and not all of us have international keyboards, so i will have to type france incorrectly, sorry.

Every country has its sonsabitches, nice guys and just ordinary people. I lived in Paris for seven months during the early 1960's and found most people quite congenial.

sorry, forgot whatever extended ascii code I needed...I'll find it mañana...

The French government have a rather unappealing attitude to languages. They've oppressed the regional languages there for centuries, and are only now starting to support them a little--probably because they think the French language itself is under threat from English. And the country is very centralised, which I am inclined against.

You don't know the half of it... we have to live next door to them!

French is not a race. It is an affliction.

ruveyn

I have a very thin book on my book shelf: War Heroes of the Vichy Regime.

I understand one can purchase nearly new assault rifles from the French Army. They have only been thrown down once.

You can spot the combat watches issued to French troops. The hands are permanently set to eleven oh five.

ruveyn

[quote="TallyMan"]Speaking as an Englishman who has lived in France for the last five years. I can say that one of the biggest problems with France is bureaucracy. The French are a nation of pen-pushers. They love paperwork. Everyone is drowning in piles of documents and paying huge amounts in taxes to employ people to generate more paperwork to pass on to other equally useless pen-pushers. It is a national preoccupation. Instead of having unemployment, France creates totally useless organisations to generate more and more documents.

This mass of bureaucracy is strangling the country from doing anything new. Take for example business start-ups. If you want to set up a typical business in England you just get on with it. The English government has a handful of organisations geared to helping you succeed and giving you the right information. There are also various tax breaks etc.

If you want to start a business in France the bureaucrats are on you like a rash. You have to wade through a massive amount of restrictions and paperwork. They hit you with taxes/charges as though you are an established business - In France you can often end up paying more in taxes/charges than your business is earning! New businesses fail five times more often than in England due to the crippling taxes / social charges and bureaucracy.

I'll bet that the French don't even have a word in their language for "entrepreneur"!
Lol

I fail to realize how being French can be as afflicting as being any other nationality on the planet, to be perfectly honest.

"I'll bet that the French don't even have a word in their language for "entrepreneur"! "

Well, kind of just said it, we use that in french. (And sorry if it was meant to be sarcastic)

'Entrepreneur' is a loanword from French.

It's amazing how many people are opaque to humor.

I seem to remember the French have some sort of 'language purity board', that tries to keep all loan words out of the perfect language...

That's easier than teaching people to pronounce English sometimes... Hebrew has five phonemic vowels, English has much more, for example. It's difficult to teach those... And it sometimes causes people being understood.

As a linguistic students who LOVES phonetics and phonolgy, I find French phonology easier than the English one. It's that people think they pronounce English correct, but they fail to recognise that they don't. Native English speakers always tell me they notice it... People just think French is hard to pronounce because of the silent consonant issue.

Once you learn the rules, you can easily pronounce it, with some mistakes probably. I can read and pronounce many languages, when I speak German people can think I'm native (although I'm not fluent) - yet I could never pronounce English without knowing it.

French people are also too thin. They eat lots of cheese, butter, high-quality pastries, and still don't put on any weight.

They have a McDonald's in Paris, but, so far, only American tourists eat there.

If more McDonald's restaurants were opened throughout the country, then they might have a chance to put a little bit of blubber on those bones.