What common questions do you get about your target language?

[lildreamsnatcher]

LATIN:
"What's the point of learning a dead language?"

MODERN GREEK:
"Is the alphabet hard to learn?"
"But is it useful?"

I don't really like talking about languages with most people. "Can you make money with this?" is a very popular mindset and discovering that someone might just genuinely enjoy the process tends to blow people's minds. I had a really hard time especially with Latin in that regard. When I got tired of bad reactions I just claimed that I'm going to move to Vatican and work for the Pope. It worked like a dream.

[jeff_lindqvist]

German:

From other speakers: "Wo hast du Deutsch gelernt?" (Where did you learn German?) or "Warst du schon in Deutschland?" (Have you ever been to Germany?)
From anyone else: "Did you learn it in school?"

Spanish:

From other speakers: "¿Fácil, verdad?" (Easy, right?) or "¿Nesecitas español para trabajar?"(Do you need Spanish for work?)
From anyone else: "Did you learn it in school?"

Based on a one-sentence response from me in German, a visiting professor asked (in Swedish) if I had studied or worked in Berlin.

I get similar questions from Spanish speakers, but my response is always the same - I learned Spanish during my high school years in the early 1990s and have barely used the language since then.

[Cavesa]

Funnily, the only language I get asked about is French. No idea why Spanish or Italian aren't too interesting for people I meet in the real life. Or perhaps there is a reason: Most people asking the questions are not really interested in my answers. They are usually more interested in listening to themselves and supposedly sounding clever while repeating some myths and prejudices (and there are significantly fewer of those about Italian or Spanish).

I mostly get questions based on the assumption that French is too hard to be learnt. Such as "oh, how did you find a job of a doctor in France in English?" (which is even funnier, coming from people complaining about bad Czech of some of the healthcare workers here ) or "isn't it too hard to learn medicine in French?" (nope, medicine is hard. But Latin makes most european language based resources rather easy. People don't believe it, just like they don't believe the Czech terminology is often more of an obstacle than the Latin one.). Or "isn't it too hard, with all the irregular tenses and the chaotic pronunciation?" (no, it is actually more regular than English. And why on earth do my logical answers based on experience get doubted every time?). Or "I see, so you are learning because the French hate to speak English?" (no, this is not true, this observation is decades old and the opposite of today's reality in most places).

A specific and rare case are questions really about the language, but again, my honest answers are still usually not welcome. Such as "it doesn't make sense, why does this French feature work like this?" The most usual answer: no, it actually doesn't, you are just making a mistake. When it comes to actually explaining the feature, the people are often not too interested either, they just wanted me to sympathise and complain about French

But there is a category of questions that has been growing lately: "How do I prepare for DELF/DALF?", and similar starting questions. These are actually the only people, who really seem to be interested in my answers and with whom it is a pleasure to talk about French. They usually have their own first hand experience with learning it to some level, they mean it (usually because they want to move abroad), we can compare methods, talk about difficulties and fun in the language, and so on. Such a question usually starts a nice conversation.