Surprised you didn't say Latin, given your username.

http://www.worldobesity.org/resource...y/#country=FRA

The point being that after 5 years of teaching a subject the level attained should be much higher than "rudimentary". It's just that the level of expectation for language tieaching in this country is so low because we don't see it as an important subject.

The friends I have who speak a second language well all learned through family links, private tuition or living abroad not from being taught at school.

... Which shows that obesity is lower in France.

French and Italian women have the lowest BMIs in Europe, British women one of the highest. British men are equally among the most overweight/obese in Europe (third after Greece and Malta).

While mine certainly was, but then I went to a good school and was packed off to France every summer from the age of 13.

You don't really begin to 'speak French' truly until you do it for A level, or you go and live there.

Sacré bleu! If you really want to learn to speak French (as well as understand it when you hear it) then you ought to spend lots of time listening to people speaking French. Give it a year, you should get on fine. If you want to study French, like how verbs are structured or whatever, then you ought to start with GCSE French or similar, then work your way up through A-level French before you go for the degree. Do you see the difference?

Plenty of people who studied French at GCSE level get on fine. Just because the OP (and yourself?) have a less-than-rudimentary grasp, it does not follow that the level of expectation for language teaching in this country is low, let alone that "we don't see it as an important subject". There is no 'we' as you imagine it, and there are literally millions of British people who found it important enough, or just interesting enough, to have paid attention in class.

there are many different dialects of French apparently, depending on the area you are visiting. At least that was my excuse when I used to go to our holiday cottage in Brittany I had six years of French lessons at school and never managed a word of French to any one whilst I was over there. It's true that most of the people you'd want or need to talk to know English in my experience.

Forgive me, I couldn't help wondering if you meant with a champenois, (of the Champagne region), accent, or with a touch of champignons, (mushrooms)!

A guy just stopped me in the street tonight to ask me something... I think he thought I was a local, since I'm alone (most tourists are couples or groups). I had no idea what he said it was so fast... I replied "Pardon, je ne parle pas français, je suis un touriste". He laughed and said something that sounded apologetic in French and went on his way

I don't know the word for "duck" in French

You're wondering if I thought his accent had a touch of mushrooms?

It's tricky in English.

Are we talking Coin-Coin, Cherie or Se baisser vivement?

well the French don't do terms of endearment for total strangers, so that narrows it down

BIB, that is what my mate found out when going to France and he said it is not just Paris.

i used to know a French girl, I have not seen her for years,, but I loved the accent, i think she went back to France.

I have an Italian friend who spent some of her teens at school in the UK. She came home and asked her (fluent English speaking) father what on earth "I don't give a flying f***" meant. After he'd spluttered and coughed, and explained that it was a very rude way of saying "I don't care", he asked her where she'd heard the expression.

He nearly had a seizure when she told him the games teacher had said it to one of the kids, and she started at a posh private school the following week.

I'm firmly of the opinion that you can't claim to speak a language until you can swear like a native speaker.

I find if you just shout loudly "Je dois pisser", someone will usually tell you.

No, I wondered if you meant that he'd been eating mushrooms when he'd said it.
(It sounded funnier in my head, which was awash with Calvados at the time.)

This is the problem so many foreign language learners face though.

When you learn a language as a course of study, you learn the formal variant. Because of course you do, it's formal, it's proper, it's testable.

But most people don't speak the formal variant. Look at English - I mean, in the UK/Éire alone, there's so many different variants, dialects, accents, colloquialisms, vulgarisms, etc. You're really only learning the bones of it - and with that, certain verbs, adjectives, etc, that are the most 'common'. But if you think about it, a lot of ESL folks come to the UK with broken English, and it's only after a very immersive stay (given that a lot of Brits can't or won't speak other languages) that they get it right. So it's only to be expected that you'd need a fair old stay in France to get your French up to grade. And the British do like to twist or ignore a lot of the rules of "formal English" in order to stick with the vernacular.

I'm near fluent when it comes to reading and writing in French, but when it comes to listening and speaking it, I'm absolutely awful. I'd be even worse if it weren't for the French friends I have who help me out. I think the rhythm of conversation is a lot different to the literacy of it.

I always thought all O Levels were graded by numbers and GCEs graded by letters.

My high school and college French were useless when I moved to Paris. Only when I had to find an electrician in a hurry, did my French improve quickly. To that end, I made sure my child learned French and went to French schools, not American ones. Child now works once a week in Paris so it was a good choice.

P.S. I recall French women as being much skinnier then than now. Now they dress like anyone else, most of the time.

Was that before or after you saw him turn up with a spanner and bucket?

Unfortunately I don't know what those are.

I just recall repair people saying "C'est normal" all the time, no matter what my complaint was.

A spanner is a thing you hit things with when you don't have a hammer and a bucket sounds like a bunch of flowers

I notice that in conversations the French often say something that sounds like "ne-vrai" or it's sort of like "ne-why?" in a questioning tone. What does it mean? I'm guessing it's the French equivalent of 'really?'