I hate English.

[jakquun]

Or to be more specific, I just f*cking hate the English language outside of english speaking countries.

I searched for a long time to find a forum that would be suitable for this kind of time. Hoping to get some good insight/advice on this issue of mine. I'm posting this question in English because I think it would be easiest for polyglots who also are native English speakers to identify with this problem. If you also struggle with this issue I'm going to post about, pleeease answer so at least I know I'm not alone.
I started at 10 years old as a carefree youngster learning my first foreign language, Spanish. At the time, I did it purely because I enjoyed it and because it made me feel special. I didn't have a care in the world.
But as I continued to add more languages to my repertoir and to travel outside of the United States, I quickly learned a fact that I had been completely oblivious too, before: English is VERY popular. On my first trip to Germany, I was frustrated that, although I had spent about a month beforehand intensively studying German, everything there seemed to be able to communicate in English, and what's more, the WANTED to. They dismissed any of my attempts to greet them in their language and continued on in English. This was the first time I had been "rejected" in speaking someone else´s language, and probably was the beginning of a complex I´ve developed in my head that I have to be "good" enough in a language in order to speak with others. I was also thoroughly surprised to hear so much English language music on the radio. Oh how blissfully ignorant I was...
In 2010 and 2011 I participated in Chinese immersion programs in China. I went there very excited to work on my Chinese, but to my dismay, I found myself again and again in situations, where the Chinese tried to FORCE me to speak English with them. I had a host family who got upset with me for not wanting to speak English with her daughter, who quite honestly also wasn´t interested in speaking. I went to a school where I literally had to refuse to speak English with certain people, who would consistently answer my Chinese questions in English. Eventually, I went on to pretend I was Spanish, and would answer any Chinese people who would try to talk to me in English in Spanish until they "verzweifelt" switched to Chinese with me.
Despite all of this I continued to love languages and I kept a pretty good attitude about it all. In 2012 I decided to apply for a scholarship to study abroad in Germany for a year, which I'm very happy to say I got. I spent my summer working hard on my German, and, although I was already slightly mentally prepared for the fact that Germans like English, I went into the program planning on speaking only German. I'm not being dramatic when I say I literally had to FIGHT at times to speak German, if not at least have good reason for "warum zum Teufel in Deutsch sprechen wollte". Deutsch is boring, Deutsch is stupid, ENGLISCH IST SO TOLL!! It´s the Weltsprache, it's this, that blablabla. I still remember the coordinator from the German chapter of my exchange organization picking us up at Frankfurt Airport and literally refusing to answer me, an exchange student who had come to Germany to SPEAK GERMAN, in German! And my German was not bad by any means, I ended up being sorted into the highest level of the German prep course before school started. But all I got out of her is a "Your Cherman is very gud!" It drove me BONKERS.
Later on in that year I continually got offers to speak English with people if "I got tired of German", bla bla bla. I began to get more and more negative about the English language and outright avoid it. Which made me even more annoyed when others would confront me with it. For the first time I started to here one of the questions I hate the very most in the world "Why don´t you like your native language?" Even if I tried to explain in to them, they still wouldn't understand.
My fear of not speaking well enough to avoid a "switch" to English by my conversation partner continued to grow. Thanks to a few showoffs, I started to interpret every time someone translated a word or sentence I didn´t understand to English (whether due to not being audible or not having the vocab) as an attack on my langauge ability.
I left Germany at the end of the year loving German and with the level C2 on the European reference frame for languages. Over the course of the next 4 years I started to study in Germany and have lived during my studies in Croatia, China and currently the Czech Republic. Next semester I will be in Russia. My language skills have continued to grow and I am approaching mastery in several languages, and have a level of at B1 (conversational intermediate) in about 10. I'm really good at languages, but I've notice over the past few years how my feelings of love and curiosity for languages has been slowly replaced by frustration, anger, exhaustion, and fear. I am SO sick and tired of being answered in English, confronted in English, downright harassed in English. It's the worst when I speak a language very well but still with a foreign accent and then just because of that I get a response in (sometimes VERY below average) English. The straw that broke the camel's back was at a gas station south of Brno in the Czech Republic where I ordered a panini and asked if they had any without meat. During that transaction I might very well have spoken better Czech than the cashier had ever heard another foreigner speak, but she heard my accent and pointed a sandwich and said "This just cheese". Out of habit I responded with "prosím?", ie. "sorry?", which I always say when this happens to get them to switch back to (insert language here), and was thoroughly frustrated. But I tried to calm myself and ate my panini. I went back to order a hotdog (my frustration had made me momentarily give up on being a vegetarian) and had a flawless, if slightly accented transaction with the cashier. I'm not exagerating when I say I spoke DAMN good Czech. Like using colloquialisms and what not. I went to the bathroom and when I got back she looked at me and said "just cheese on hotdog?" I looked at her dumbfounded. I was furious. I one again pretended to not understand and she repeated herself in Czech while laughing at my faked confusion, and then I said, almost losing control of myself (in Czech) "Yes, I have an accent, but I speak Czech!"
She responded "Oh, mluvíte česky?" (you speak Czech?), as if this had come as a big surprise for her. Like I hadn't just spoken to her for 5 minutes before only in very good Czech. Unfortunately, this situation was also not something I was experiencing for the first time.
"Yes, I speak Czech, so I would appreciate an answer in Czech!" I responded very tersely.
"Oh, I though, maybe English would be easier for you." Unfortunately, this insulting and belittling sentence is also by a long shot not something I had heard for the first time. This worker at the gas station, who had NO idea where I was from (again and again I've had people say they couldn't recognize my accent, Slovaks even think I'm Czech), and had an English level of maximum A2+, was insinuating I couldn't order a hotdog in the language I'm approaching a C1 level in (i.e. very high fluency). I lost it.
"If I wanted to speak English with you, then I would've spoken English in the first place!! But if I speak Czech, I expect an answer in Czech! You remember that for next time!"
She scawfed at me and say "I definitely will not remember that." She turned to the next customer and said: "Unbelievable."
Leaving the gas station, hotdog in hand, I was close to tears. I just couldn't take it anymore. I HATE HATE HATE being answered in English, I HATE HATE HATE the things people say that belittle my language abilities, make me feel like its a waste of time, make me frustrated and sad. And worst of all, I felt trapped in a cycle of getting really down on myself, getting angry at others, and frustrated with languages all together, every time something like this happens (which, unfortunately, is pretty often). I feel myself getting more and more radicle in my views about hating the usage of English in not english speaking countries. I feel so frustrated by the fact that, instead of bringing me together with people, languages almost seem to be keeping me apart from others. I just feel so worn out and exhausted. I'm scared of conversations, lest once again I feel the humiliation and anger that that damn gas station worker and so many others though out the years and in my different countries have caused me. I just don't know what to do. One of the worst parts is that NOONE understands how frustrating and exhausting all of this is. Heck, most English speakers f-ing love not having to speak anything but their native tongue when they travel, whereas here I am getting angry every time someone tries to speak to me in it.
Any advice from anyone other there? If you've read all of this and are going to respond, you're officially my favorite person. Thanks, Jack.

[linguoboy]

My fear of not speaking well enough to avoid a "switch" to English by my conversation partner continued to grow. Thanks to a few showoffs, I started to interpret every time someone translated a word or sentence I didn´t understand to English (whether due to not being audible or not having the vocab) as an attack on my langauge ability.

I think this is the crux of the issue. As you've mentioned in passing, there are many reasons why L2 speakers prefer speaking English which have nothing at all to do with your level of proficiency in their L1. So if they insist on speaking English with you, you can't take it personally. It's not you, it's them.

Once I realised this, I became a lot less annoyed by people speaking English to me. (Ich hab auch in Deutschland gewohnt, um Deutsch zu üben.) You just need to seek out those who are willing and spend as much time with them as you can. And keep in mind that (with the exception of guys like the exchange programme coordinator), helping you to practice your German is not their job. They want to practice their L2, too.

[voron]

I lived for 2 years in Turkey and I only had a couple of occasions when people would try to speak English with me. I just continued in Turkish and they eventually gave up and switched to Turkish, too.

One case was particularly bad. It was at my Kurdish class. At a break, one girl approached me and started speaking in English to me. I replied to her in Turkish (I really wanted it to be Kurdish but my Kurdish was not that good at the moment), to which she said, rather insolently, something like "I am a journalist and I want to practise my English with you, please reply to me in English". I was really surprised with this directness, and I replied, in Turkish, "And I don't have any intention speaking English with you whatsoever", after which she lost interest in me.

There were many other cases when I would have a short convo with a shawarma seller in Turkish, and then handing me my shawarma they would say "Ok?", or "Thank you" in English, but that didn't aggravate me in the slightest. Yeah I know that my face screams "a foreigner" to them and it's hard to shake off this impression. They are just trying to be polite and speak "my" language with me, even though they only know a couple of words in it.

Now that I'm thinking more about it, I don't think people refusing to speak the local language with me was ever a problem to me in any country I have lived in or visited. Is it maybe because I have a pronounced Slavic face? (I don't know how pronounced it is, really). In Italy I actually kind of had the opposite problem: I was not too willing to learn Italian so I would prefer people speaking English to me, but they would refuse and say with a smile that they don't know English. During my 1 week visit to Serbia, I was never replied to in English even once, again maybe because they perceived me as their "Slavic brother".

[הענט]

Když ti tak vadí, že ti lidé odpovídají anglicky, tak já se toho vyvaruju. Musíš si ale uvědomit, že lidé v cizích zemích, kde se nemluví anglicky si jí rádi procvičí. Bez ohledu na jejich úroveň. Chápu, že to může být ubíjející, ale mně to neva. Když na někoho mluvím srbsky nebo čínsky, tak mi stačí když mi rozumí a klidně mi může odpovědět česky. A to ty s C1 úrovní můžeš též.