Do Italians hate the English or is it the language barrier?

[SoreFeets]

Currently in beautiful Italy. Love it here but we appear to be hated by the staff in most places, especially food/drink settings.

This week alone we’ve had receipts thrown at us, we went to pay for a coffee in a little shop and the woman wouldn’t even look at us, took the money, looked really pissed off and immediately moved on to the next customer without a word (but was happy and smiley with them).

DH hired some bikes and had the keys thrown at him without a word.

Last night in a restaurant the waiters were deliberately tending every table but ours until DH caught the attention of one of them - waiter then took our drinks order but when we tried to order food he threw the menus back onto the table and walked off!! He then said something to another waiter who looked at us and laughed. Nobody came back to take the food order.

Now this exact same thing happened in Rome a few years ago, everyone just seemed to hate us. We would try to book a table in a restaurant and they would say it was full … before letting someone else in 😂

so I looked it up last night and I found no suggestion of Italians having a problem with English …. But what I did find was Italians have no time for people who have not bothered to learn the language.

Is this the problem? I have tried to learn a bit of Italian before coming but nowhere near enough which is obviously my fault. DH doesn’t speak a word of Italian other than Grazie.

We’re coming back next year and I aim to be practically fluent in Italian in that time! AIBU to think/hope we’ll have a totally different experience?

i have lots of Italian friends and in my experience they can be slightly more forward compared to brits. Let’s be honest brits are known to be passive aggressive and polite under all circumstances whereas others might be more direct. It doesn’t mean they’re hate the British though, they just weren’t raised to be people pleasers?

I think a lot of Brits feel like a ponce, putting on airs and graces, if they say ‘please thankyou, hello, goodbye’ etc in the local language. I know I enjoy speaking those words in other languages, mainly because it is fun, not out of good manners, but I still feel a bit of a ponce while I do. I doubt if people from any other country would be perceived as being a bit ‘up themselves’ by their fellow countrymen if they speak in English.

Same here. The rudest people to me whenI visited were other British tourists including one almost pushing me to get on the escalator in the airport despite there being a queue behind me and me about to step on. I had to stop DH from causing a scene.

I think a lot of Brits feel like a ponce, putting on airs and graces, if they say ‘please thankyou, hello, goodbye’ etc in the local language. I know I enjoy speaking those words in other languages, mainly because it is fun, not out of good manners, but I still feel a bit of a ponce while I do. I doubt if people from any other country would be perceived as being a bit ‘up themselves’ by their fellow countrymen if they speak in English.

And this is what we struggle against when teaching kids foreign languages in school in the UK. It's an attitude I've never seen in any other country and it's frankly bonkers. Speaking the language of the country you're in is sensible and practical, not 'poncey'. It's such a weird, insular way of looking at communication.

Kids from other countries think it's useful and normal to speak another language (especially English) and the more you can sound like a native the better. Meanwhile Brits either giggle and snigger at the funny words and sounds, or just won't even try because their too embarrassed by the idea of trying to sound like those funny forriners, or can speak but just worry about looking too try-hard. It's depressing, frankly!

@AllProperTeaIsTheft I disagree, I’m not British born and english is not my native language. I still feel, if not poncey, self conscious when attempting to speak say italian or french on a holiday. I’m quite shy too which doesn’t help.

I’d say that many other people from my home country feel the same, they’d rather resort to english on their med holidays as it’s familiar and what they’ve learnt at school.

I’ve always found Italian people very friendly on the whole, especially in restaurants and shops.

I also used to work in catering and had to serve tourists daily. If I had been rude because they forgot to say please (some languages don’t have the word please at all) or attempt a chit chat about the weather, I would have been sacked. So why it’s ok the other way round?

Also, as already mentioned, in many other countries they really don’t get the difference between english, welsh and scotts. You can claim to be a scott as much as you like but they still file you in the english category in their heads. Because UK = England. (Disclaimer, some do understand it but there are large swathes who really don’t give it any thought).

I think it has to be something to do with your autism? Is your partner also autistic - body language/ the way you say things?
I can’t think it’s because you don’t know the language. I’ve been all off over Italy and barely used a word of Italian but waiters have always been polite enough.

I spent 5 years there, right on the Slovenian border, and the order of languages spoken other than Italian was Slovenian, German and (spoken among the older people but understood by their grandchildren) Friuliano/Furlan. English didn't get much of a look-in and if it was taught in schools it wasn't taught very successfully. If you could dredge up a Slovenian grandparent, which many children could, you were allowed to go to a Slovenian school (in Italy) where the standard of English teaching was very much higher.

Totally agree.

I wonder why so many English people are concerned about looking "poncey" but not at all concerned about looking lazy, entitled and ignorant. As I've been told many times in perhaps less explicit terms by continental Europeans and a few Welsh people

I went to Italy in my 20's. First day there I went out to find a supermarket. A young Italian lady approached me and asked me a question in Italian. I apologised and said I didn't speak Italian ( in Italian) and got a load of abuse off her then she stomped off 🤷 nice welcome to Italy!

Never found Italians anything other than friendly.

Don’t you worry, English people fully expect to be judged and treated with disdain by uncharitable and prejudiced people no matter what they do.

No, any kind of very milky coffee is not acceptable after breakfast.

I've always found Italians to be very welcoming friendly and hospitable. I have to caveat that I do speak fluent Italian but my husband doesn't speak more than a couple of words and I don't think he's found any different. We love going on holiday to Italy for this very reason (well, as well as the stunning scenery architecture and delicious food, obviously).

Meanwhile Brits either giggle and snigger at the funny words and sounds, or just won't even try because their too embarrassed by the idea of trying to sound like those funny forriners

This is a very uncharitable take.

I think it’s more that Brits are looking over their shoulder expecting someone to take the piss out of them for being pretentious. It’s a fear of humiliation. It’s comes from class oppression “Who do they think they are, being all la de da like that !?!” not having ‘ideas above your station’, etc.

I'm not remotely worried, fp, just sad how true it is, having been embarrassed by English people's total lack of effort so many times. When speaking the language of the country I was in, I've also been "language shamed" and told I was showing off by English people, never by a foreigner. It's just bizarre.

Uncharitable 🤣 Why? English kids have the same number of brain cells as anyone else and the same if not far better schools than many European countries, so why do they deserve special treatment and why the terrible performance in foreign languages compared to other countries? Parents' insular, entitled attitudes.

I recently went on holiday where there were guests from many countries. The Italians were very rude and had little in the way of manners (not only the English who noticed, many other nationalities did). The rudest of them all though were the Russian guests.

1. English is now an international language. It’s the language of business. Most children learn it around the world in order to have a fighting chance in various jobs market. It’s nothing to do with them being considerate, well brought-up, hard-working, etc. It is in their self-interest to learn English. This is for historical reasons which no living English person bears the responsibility for.
2. This means that when English people learn a foreign language it is unlikely to be as essential or advantageous as learning English is for native speakers of other languages, there is not the same self-interested drive for English people to learn other languages. So learning them is more a ‘nice to have’.
3. Because of this, English people learning other languages have many other languages to choose from, none of which with be as useful as their mother tongue when travelling. So there is even less incentive. This doesn’t make English people rude, entitled, whatever, it’s just the way things turned out.

Do you not think that it might have something, at least, to do with English being widely spoken around the world, and the way there isn't really an obvious second language for British people to learn? Whereas many European languages are barely if at all spoken outside the country, so if they want to communicate with anyone outside their country, they have little other option other than to learn another language.

I mean, I've also been embarrassed by British people abroad bellowing in some weird kind of pidgin English as though everyone who isn't a native English speaker must be deaf and stupid, so I do get your point, to a certain extent.

A lot of British people, it seems to me, have this (mostly false) idea that many/most people in continental Europe speak four or five languages fluently. In all my years in Germany, it was very rare to meet anyone who spoke a foreign language that wasn't English with anything like proficiency, unless they had parents who weren't native German speakers and grew up bilingual. Most of the Germans who speak French, in my experience, speak it in the same way that a lot of British people speak it. They can order a beer and ask for directions but not much else. And the majority of Germans barely speak French at all beyond Bonjour.

While I was typing my last post, FlakyPoet made an excellent point about lots of people learning English because it's in their own interest. To take another example, historically a lot more Polish people have spoken German than German people have spoken Polish, because Germany has long been a very wealthy country and a great place to find a job, whereas Poland hasn't been so much. The imbalance isn't because Poles are so awesome at languages or so polite and respectful or have amazing schools, and it's not because Germans are too arrogant and entitled to learn the language of one of their neighbours. They don't learn Polish unless they live near the border or do business in Poland or have a Polish partner, because otherwise there's no incentive for them to learn it. There is a big incentive for them to learn English.

A lot of British people, it seems to me, have this (mostly false) idea that many/most people in continental Europe speak four or five languages fluently.

There is truth in this. I think there is also a lot of shame and embarrassment British people feel at how well people from other countries can speak English compared to how well the average Brit can speak other languages, even though we don’t have the same incentive to learn.

There can be a thing where people who get satisfaction from learning a different language well can then want to learn another one, so chances are, a non-native English speaker who has learned English, might want to learn another language too, but English people rarely learn other languages to that level of satisfaction, unless they went to really good fee-paying schools.

The most remarkable thing about this thread is the level of self criticism and oikiophobia on display.

I lived in France for several years, I never heard the French speak so depreciatingly about ‘the French’ . Of course, a lot of French people think that people from other parts of France ( especially Brittany for some reason) are not quite on their own local level. I used to spend a lot of time in Italy, and I noticed the same phenomenon there, Florentines don’t think that Sienese, for example, are quite up to their level ( Venetians are just Venetian). But overall they would basically defend the honour and worth of their compatriots against other nationalités.

No one I knew shared the dismissive or hostile attitude to the British that most of the posters on this thread display, although I suppose that as they were my colleagues or friends, that may have been a self selecting sample.

This is the thing. English self-deprecation makes us an easy target. While we beat ourselves up, metaphorically speaking, people of other nationalities who for whatever reason want to vent their ‘legitimate’ xenophobia are more than happy to stick the boot in.

Oof! That’s for the Empire (although, sh! we have our own expansionist past too).
Oof! That’s for not speaking our language (although, sh! we never learned English to connect with British people anyway).
Oof! That’s for Brexit (although, sh! we have our own misgivings about the EU).
Etc, etc…

'Meanwhile Brits either giggle and snigger at the funny words and sounds, or just won't even try because their too embarrassed by the idea of trying to sound like those funny forriners'

This is a very uncharitable take.

I think it’s more that Brits are looking over their shoulder expecting someone to take the piss out of them for being pretentious. It’s a fear of humiliation. It’s comes from class oppression “Who do they think they are, being all la de da like that !?!” not having ‘ideas above your station’, etc.

I'm not sure it always is tbh. I've taught languages in UK schools for 30 years, from inner city comps to private schools. Yes, you definitely see less of that attitude in kids from wealthier, more cosmopolitan families, but a hefty dose of it in middle class kids too. And less of it in more culturally diverse schools, where lots of kids speak more than one language at home. It seems a much more prevalent attitude among boys than girks too.

I think it's more to do with living on a small island with no borders and therefore no language interchange/mingling across borders. Plus the fact that English is so dominant in the world. My students wondered why their German exchange partners were so much better at English than they were at German... until they went there and saw how much English the Germans are exposed to every single day, while they never see or hear a word of German outside of lesson time. That's not their fault, of course!