It’s funnier with French because no one hates the Dutch language more than the Dutch, but France thinks everything it does is the best.
It’s a stupid language making no sense at all. Weird grammer. Plus, it has weird sounds. Like the R and G, and flattened vowels. Whenever our prime-minister speaks English, it’s a massive shame factor for any Dutch person. Oh and not just the current bozo, the past several as well. Like if it’s mandatory to speak horrible English to become prime-minister or something.
French accent? Super sexy. Irish? Scottish? Oeh yeah. German? So sophisticated, or a female with soft German: rrrrrrrr, melting. Italian? Spanish? Greek? Hell yeah. Norwegian, Danish? So bad ass viking. Swedish? Sure. Even Sud Afrikaans English accent is sexy AF. That language even originates from Dutch!
But Dutch itself? Boner gone, give me a paper bag with 2 holes in it and fast!
It’s not without reason English officially isn’t considered a foreign language in the Netherlands anymore. There are even talks about adapting it as a second national language, as the general knowledge of English is of a certain level, it’s getting close to Dutch. The only people in the Netherlands who are unable to speak English are a few boomers and some who haven’t read any book besides the Bible.
The grammar rules make no sense and sometimes have more exceptions than cases it applies to.
I’m married to a foreigner and regularly get stuck trying to explain why a sentence is the way it is.
French people are busy hating on themselves. I’ve heard about French people hating on people from Paris so since Ive ment French people during my exchange/foreign semester I tried asking them if they really hate people from Paris and they confirmed it for me. All non Paris French people hate on Paris French people lol
I liken this to people’s irritation with NYC-philes - the ones who think the universe revolves around NYC, to the point when even on the west coast, they refer to it as ‘The City’. And so much of Paris is radically more inwardly-celebrating-cosmopolitan, diverse yet oddly intolerant uptight? - than the smaller cities much less the countryside, I think I can grok their irritation.
Having only visited twice in my youth, certainly no expert.
This sounds similar to most dutch people silently hating people from Amsterdam.
I wouldn’t say french is the best language by any means. I think that while it has a pretty extensive vocabulary it is quite inefficient and conservative by nature
The reason it has an extensive vocab is because the french are purists who need to invent their own version of every new word in existence, instead of just loaning words from other languages like every other language does.
An example of this is “computer”. Every other language uses that term, except for fucking french who call it an “ordinateur”
This is a tad misleading.
Other languages may use the word computer in their language but some also have their own word, even if not using it.
Spanish has ‘el ordenador’ and German has ‘der Rechner’.
Also, it’s a bit rich to say French has an extended vocab when English sometimes imported French words twice, like warranty and guarantee, or guardian and warden. In fact, English supposedly has more words than French.
French is purist but then English took words like ‘dette’ and ‘doute’ and added a ‘b’ just to keep it closer from Latin… right.
Les francophones aiment perpétuer l’idée que le français est une langue riche, complexe et difficile, mais en réalité c’est rien de si extraordinaire. ;)
Some slight pushback from a French person: we aren’t purists, our old reactionary institutions are purist (notably the Académie Française which, fun fact, is officially “in charge” of the french language while having zero linguists in its ranks).
Hang out with a group of young adults in France and you’ll hear a ton of English and a decent sprinkling of Arabic amongst the French.
Also, it’s not just French, Spanish has “ordenador”. It makes some linguistic sense; computers do compute but they also sort and arrange numbers.
