I asked a visitor to the farm house, “Café, monsieur?” and he said, in French, “Ah, you can speak French!” Rather like the Chinese saying to anyone who can say 你好 (nǐ hǎo / ”you good” / hello), “Your Chinese is really good!”
This puts me in mind of an instance in Singapore in the sixties when the British had a military presence there. An English woman and her three-year-old daughter were on a local bus, which was a rare occasion, and the little girl was very chatty, as is the wont of her age group. A Singaporean passenger sitting behind her said to her friend, “Wow! So young and already she speaks such fluent English!”
(France/Singapore, 2012/1960s)
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