I've already put in about 3 posts on this subject, but I'm bored and my partners still sleeping off yesterday's party, so I'm gonna give you a few more!
As I've already said previously, I've lived and worked abroad for a time, and obviously didn't get there fully integrated and made a few mistakes myself, which I thought people might find interesting (though I guess strictly speaking I wasn't really a tourist, but meh...).

French is a bloody hard language to learn to speak when your used to English, I had tried to prep myself when I knew I was going to be working in Brussels for a while by learning it from a tape set, but these things are bloody useless as they teach you a 'perfect fairytale' French and NO ONE speaks like that! It's the equivalent of hearing a foreigner walk into your bar and say 'I say, barkeep, I would like to pur-chase one of your fine beers if you please!', although it's cute, people just laugh at you! Anyway, early on as I struggled with it I had plenty of 'faux pas'.

The way the English pronounce 'Q', 'Queue' or 'Cue' is EXACTLY the same as the French slang for 'Arse', however the french for 'Q' is (initially, to my English ears anyway) infinitesimally different, but completely evident to all French speaking peoples. It took me about 6 months to realise that it has a nasality to it (as in most French vowels) and to get it right. Until then, if any one of my French speaking friends needed a good laugh, they had only to ask me to recite the alphabet!

The 'sex' of a word in French can completely change it's meaning, for instance 'La Tour' is a tower, where as 'Le Tour' is a tour/journey, as in 'Le Tour De France' and the only way to ever learn the sexes of words is simply to commit them ALL individually to memory, so as you can imagine, this is tricky, and initially I was usually more often wrong than right.
Now, I was with friends going to a girls party, she had a cat, it was a gorgeous fluffy little soul so almost the first thing I said was what a lovely cat she had. As you can probably guess, the French for cat is 'le Chat' (pronounced 'sha') and I had just said 'Vous avez une tres joli chat!', pronouncing it in the feminine ('ooon shat') and had just told her what a pretty cunt she had. Thank god I was amongst friends.

Oh, and the French slang for cock is 'La Bit'. Yes men, your cock is feminine in French, all makes perfect sense doesn't it?

Oh, and the Belgians are OBSESSED with 'politess' which is their main criticism of the English and Americans equally, that we don't have any. What it is is hard to get as a concept, but basically it's a collection of curious and quaint little customs everyone is taught from birth, usually to do with food and drink, performed with an almost superstitious exactitude by everyone everytime they do a certain thing. Examples: don't pour the last dreg out of a bottle of red wine, always cut brie in a diagonal to the back of the slice, NEVER eat the last of ANYTHING at a party or function in case someone turns up late, you shake hands with a stranger, kiss a casual friend on one cheek (male or female!), kiss a good friend on BOTH cheeks, and a close family member REPEATEDLY on both cheeks, often whilst shaking their hands.
Obviously these things are completely alien to an English visitor and take some time to learn, but I nearly lost a good friend once when he found me in a bar and obligingly bought me a drink when I was all spent up and I, in my merry state, forgot myself and took a sip out of my drink before he had even picked his up, let alone had the first sip!
Yes, a HEINOUS insult to him! Visitors be warned!

And finally a slightly off topic but non the less (I think!) fascinating fact about the French language:

The French language has been 'kept pure' by the pedantic authorities in charge of such things for about 200 years now, which is why when you read a menu and it has burger in it, it isn't called a burger, it's called 'Une pate de boufe dan une petite pain blanc avec salade et pomme frites' or whatever (I never learned to read or write French terribly well, so apologies to all French readers) and 'apperail de photo' (machine for pictures) is a camera, and so on, as officially they aren't supposed to add ANY new words and haven't for over two centuries now.
They aren't even allowed to call their newborns something un-French!
Of course, most people, especially the young, say the proper word for things anyway, but this business of keeping it 'pure' has resulted in modern people in a modern world full of modern things with a 200 year out-of-date language with which to express such concepts.

Our job there as stocktakers involved scanning tickets on the merchandise we were totting up, each of us with a little over-the-shoulder electronic computer connected to the scanner, which then connected to a larger central one that figures out the final figures and sends them down the telephone wire to the central database to be checked and sorted before being then passed on in written form to the shop's central management. ANYHOO, as you can imagine, sometimes something went wrong, and as there isn't even the word 'computer' in the French language (something that translates as 'machine that does numbers' or something stupid liike that) never mind the names for the individual parts, you can imagine how things would then go down! Often over the phone, the caller miming with their hands what had to be done or what they had done already, obviously to no avail, using the words 'petit truc' (little thingy) for everything and trying desperately to hold the concept of what was occuring in their heads without any words to visualise or describe it. Madness!

This was years ago so maybe it's different now, but I doubt it. Maybe time to let that one go? Maybe just a bit!?

Right, anyway, it's bloody midday now and we got to bed at 130am, so I'm gonna go kick sleeping beauty out of bed, the lazy @$*&!
( ..wil, Sun 10 Jul 2005, 12:10, Reply)