>>2801984> I've had Germans, French, and Italians all openly criticize me when I tried to address them in or speak in their languages.I’m honestly surprised that you got shit from Italians for speaking Italian; I was just in Italy last week and people were frequently really nice about our efforts to speak Italian. Were you actually just speaking Spanish but trying to pronounce it like it was Italian? I’ve heard one story about people getting irritated by an American who was doing that, but I think it was mostly because the fake-Italian speaker was nearly impossible to understand. (And, curiously, a couple of the Italians I was talking to actually spoke Spanish.)
Legends about French people being rude about language are nearly universal, of course, but there too it’s very rarely been my experience, and my French is terrible.
Germans can be blunt and rude in general, but their criticism of my imperfect German has usually just taken the form of repeating corrections of my mistakes back at me—it’s never seemed hurtful, just autistic. Like they’re not trying to make fun of me, they’re just making sure they understood me.