Sadly it’s not a joke, we’re really bad at English over here, and the police are no better (my guess would be they’re actually worse at it). I noticed that people under 30 are getting better though.
Most probably not. And if you’re refugees? You’ll have better chance with the BBC.
More seriously, we have serious problems with our police. There should be someone speaking English when you call, but probably not well, and 50% chance is he’s very racist. You also need to convince him that it’s a true emergency, or they won’t do anything.
I dunno, but I just Googled for both the National Police and the Paris police department to look for contact information. In both cases, Google sent me to the English language Wikipedia page (which linked to it), andt the websites themselves were only French.
considers
I guess maybe one could call the French embassy in Vietnam. They could presumably do Vietnamese or something.
EDIT: Ironically, I did almost the same thing the other day. I noticed, from an article, that a number of shops in Ukraine last winter that had lost power due to Russian missiles were running space heaters on diesel generators. That wastes a lot of diesel – there are inexpensive Chinese diesel heaters that could be used instead. I went trying to find some sort of contact person in the Ukrainian government involved with energy who might be a reasonable person to drop a note to, but there’s only so much in English. I eventually wound up trying to contact a charity in the UK that had been working to heat Ukrainian homes that had been impacted by explosions instead, hoping that they could direct me to a relevant party. And I wasn’t in the position of having a frantic, suffocating family member calling me on the other end – I was more willing to spend time searching.
I know it’s a common joke that French people don’t speak English, but I’m sure their police surely would understand & speak English?
Sadly it’s not a joke, we’re really bad at English over here, and the police are no better (my guess would be they’re actually worse at it). I noticed that people under 30 are getting better though.
Most probably not. And if you’re refugees? You’ll have better chance with the BBC.
More seriously, we have serious problems with our police. There should be someone speaking English when you call, but probably not well, and 50% chance is he’s very racist. You also need to convince him that it’s a true emergency, or they won’t do anything.
That’s actually quite good, usually police are like 90% very racist.
That is true, but I wouldn’t want to bet my life on that! :D
I would - but only because I am not African
I dunno, but I just Googled for both the National Police and the Paris police department to look for contact information. In both cases, Google sent me to the English language Wikipedia page (which linked to it), andt the websites themselves were only French.
considers
I guess maybe one could call the French embassy in Vietnam. They could presumably do Vietnamese or something.
EDIT: Ironically, I did almost the same thing the other day. I noticed, from an article, that a number of shops in Ukraine last winter that had lost power due to Russian missiles were running space heaters on diesel generators. That wastes a lot of diesel – there are inexpensive Chinese diesel heaters that could be used instead. I went trying to find some sort of contact person in the Ukrainian government involved with energy who might be a reasonable person to drop a note to, but there’s only so much in English. I eventually wound up trying to contact a charity in the UK that had been working to heat Ukrainian homes that had been impacted by explosions instead, hoping that they could direct me to a relevant party. And I wasn’t in the position of having a frantic, suffocating family member calling me on the other end – I was more willing to spend time searching.
Some, yes, but far from all.