I suppose that’s true, @stella and of course a lot of us struggle to become even half-way competent in the language. I think quite a number of them are older people who tried and then gave up and are now too tired and jaded…
More than likely… many of them are.
I know from experience, that it’s horrible feeling you can’t open your mouth for fear of getting it wrong…
So, yes, I can understand them wanting to live within their comfort zone …
Tried and gave up not sure that the trying was that great,but the biggest draw back next to uk television is speaking english at home.because why would you not. This happends
in many places with all nationalities when you retire and don’t have daily contact with native speakers the use it or lose it takes over.
1 Like
That makes a lot of sense @flocreen - and the older you get the harder it is! The energy levels are often just not there and everything is an effort…
We try to speak more French at home but it’s not at all easy. The two biggest helps for me are, I think, not having English tv and also, strangely enough, Covid, since it has seriously reduced the number of English visitors we have…
2 Likes
We speak English at home but have no TV… hurrah… we listen to French radio…
We do read the French News every morning and discuss what’s going-on. Sometimes one of us (or both) gets completely the wrong end of the stick… thus nothing makes sense… so we revisit “whatever” to figure things out… but it’s all a means of learning. 
1 Like
I should add going to classes that are just english people ,because the chatter around is english not french , trying to read and write before speaking which causes the dreaded am I saying it right which will block out any word flow.I could go on but won’t cos it gives the impression that I know it all when I don’t.
1 Like
So very true! Plus the fear of being thought a fool! (for me, anyway)
It took me years to finally just shrug my shoulders and prattle…
1 Like
It certainly helps if you live in an area that is not an enclave of English speakers. There are a couple of towns in our departement where a very high percentage of the population are British…
It can be weird the way the brain works with languages, after the strokes it took a year and a half before I was mostly back to where I was relearning English, really frustrating at times as I knew what I wanted to say but it was gibberish that came out (my OH mights say it’s alway gibberish 
) but I haven’t had the same luck with French.
I can still understand mostly what is being said to me but the neural links from brain to mouth are normally gone, but frustratingly every so often I can, like yesterday, go into the shop talk smalltalk with the shopkeeper who speaks excellent English and he will say you know we just had that entire conversation in excellent French, I am not even aware I was speaking it, but 10 minutes later nothing, it’s really frustrating and I can kind of see how when your older trying to learn a new language it can be a lot harder and frustrating, as I know it’s in there but can’t get it to come out when I want it to.
I have stopped going into places with my OH when she is going to speak quite a bit of French as while she is doing really well, but I had a habit of if she was struggling, I would either correct her or tell her what they were saying and not let her work it out for herself, it was a hindrance for her as she was overthinking things and I was just making her worse.
Where we are can be quite difficult for her as the locals can be like machine guns, as they really speak very quickly and she really struggles with that at times, I feel really sorry for her as she asks them to slow down but within 30 sec they are back up to full speed again .
She has found a site that really works for her, I will ask which one when she gets back.
3 Likes
OH says it is Preply she uses, she prefers one on one rather than Babbel which she was using before.