Thank you Claire for your remarks !

I must say I am sadly not surprised by what you experienced with the french....

I feel I must just add a few precisions :

I also find the french rude, but there is hardly no way they can realize that they are rude because their behaviour is normal to them. The same way they don’t realize that they are arrogant because this is the normal behaviour to them...

Some times, they might not be as rude as they look, you mentionned that « to smile » was simple courtesy : well in France it is not. It shows some sort of weekness or lack of serious... (of course I totally disagree with all that since I get on much better with my anglo saxon « cousins »).

By the way I will be more cautious with someone who smiles to much if he is French because it will be purely commercial whereas in UK or the US I will find this very normal or friendly..

When one travels in France he comes across more people working in public services.... But sadly enough, in private places we « french » do not smile much and can be quite rude aswell...

They are not like that towards foreigners only, even if they make very little efforts with them.

France is a very stratefied society. Intellectuals and upper middle class people are kinder to oneanother and others... Yet from my point of view they are not interested in someone whose language or clothes show he belongs to a lower level class. In some ways, lower midlle class people imitate them feeling ignored and more or less ignoring others.

I must not forget to say that lots of french would accuse US citizens of being rude because they can speak very loud not worrying about what others think about it. But like you I suppose, I experience this quite often with US and French tourists or people... (like Italiens often go in lowd talking groups of 6 to 12 or more -like Japaneese, but Japanees are quiet)

I don’t think people are lazier in France than let’s say in the US. But you know that a proper lunch and a proper lunchtime are sacred to them. Lots of foreigners dislike this french « rule ».

Besides, the french relate to work very differently from anglo saxons or germans for instance... :

Thank you for all the translations that you taught me for bon courage« ... And this brings me to what I tried to express : the french go »bon courage« all the time because they have a tensed relation to work and are not brought up with the idea that work can provide pleasure besides of course tiredness and stress... Because of that education they all take theme selves very seriously and even people with a nice job half pretend that they are going through a hard time... They don’t smile (only with people whom they know they can trust », and this makes the atmosphere heavier , with lots of conflicts... They are very, very, very self conscious....

I dont think french are lazy but they are in a way rational and cartesien in such a way that they have the highest productivity by the hour in the world. Of course this has a lot to do with the 35 h week but also with the suppression of bank tellers (cash machines record number) , petrol station employees, inventing the hypermarkets and so on... (endless list).

Actually, French are more agressive than rude, also because of the selection they go through during their youth.

Finally I was going to forget that I meant that we say « bon courage » all the time because we need it, maybe more than others...

I think you misundertood what I said on monotony of the language... English is not monotonous at all, on the contrary, whereas French is one of the most monotonous languages...

I also meant that English allows to express much more nuances also thanks to onomatopeous words such as those you quoted from derived from german and english itself... and it (english)has by far the richest vocabulary.

So I agree with what you explained about the accuracy and touchness in english language...

I was lucky you read what I wrote on french language because it is taboo in france (sacred language, france’s greatest monument) and heresy to most french and lots of foreigners...

Finally, I can just tell you about 2 bestsellers that help understand the french and france :

« 60 million frenchmen can’t be wrong » by a canadian couple : one is french canadian, the other english canadian.

I liked it :

http://www.sixtymillionfrenchmen.com/

and

« a year in the merde » (by an englishman) Some guy’s experience in France, interesting but not very refined...

http://www.amazon.fr/exec/obidos/ASIN/0552772968/402-8506198-3444915

These 2 books give a pretty good idea of what the french are and why...

In case you read this article , best regards Claire...

Marc P