Originally Posted by cooker
I'd always heard Parisiens were rude, but I was a tad more sympathetic to them after I went there and discovered every second person is a tourist and they're all constantly asking for directions in English. I'm sure it's easy to occasionally forget they are spending money keeping the city solvent, and lose it when you're asked the 30th time where the Eiffel Tower is (hint: you can see it from everywhere in the city)
It is even more enlightening when you look at a French book on language and see so many familiar words and realize that often we are simply throwing their language back at them, only very badly pronounced. The word "direction" for instance is exactly the same but pronouned differently. Symmpathetic is similar but with a "que" at the end. "sympathique" Solvent is close... "dissolvant."
Of course the arrangement of the sentences is a bit different also... as are the use of words with male and female roots... thus la and le can be quite confusing.