It can be frustrating when you’re in a country to learn a language and everyone wants to speak to you in English. This happened to me a lot when I lived in Holland, several years ago. I’m tall and blonde, so people would automatically start speaking to me in Dutch. But once they heard my accent, they would immediately switch to English (yes, I speak Dutch – my only quantifiable skill acquired during four years of college, thanks to a sleeping dictionary in the form of a rosy cheeked foreign exchange student from Amsterdam).

It was frustrating – I really wanted to improve my Dutch, but it was constantly suffering at the cost of someone else improving his or her English.

When the same thing happens to me here in France, it tends to bum me out, too. But recently I learned an important lesson in language etiquette from an English traveler – those Brits are just so on top of their manners, I swear.

Chris the Londoner spoke great French. But when a waiter came to take our order and spoke to us in English, Chris responded in his mother tongue as if he didn’t have a drop of French in him. It was obvious, he told me, that the waiter wanted to practice his English with us. And why shouldn’t we indulge him a little, Chris said.

When I thought about it, he was clearly right.

To respond to the waiter in French – just because we wanted to practice and just because we were in France (common alibis) – would have come off as insult to the waiter’s attempt. As if we were saying that his English just wasn’t up to snuff, and wasn’t our French just so much better?

After all, there are plenty of French who can’t speak English and with whom we would find plenty of time to practice the subjunctive and all that other crazy French grammar.

- by Terry Ward