One time when my mom visited France, she asked a shop's clerk for directions. She tried French but kind of gave up and used some English words scattered throughout her sentence for words she didn't know. The clerk acted annoyed and pretended not to understand, so my mom tried to use only her broken French. The clerk responded very quickly in French.

My mom then said, in English, "I'm sorry, I didn't get that, French is such a beautiful language but I'm having a hard time learning it". The clerk then completely 180'ed her attitude, acted all happy and switched to perfect, fluent English, with almost no French accent.

That situation taught me that some French people apparently just want you to suck the metaphorical dick of their culture before they choose to be nice to you lol.

All those people online with their anecdotes agreeing with what you wrote, yet my experience has been the complete opposite. I think the problem is Americans being insufferable assholes, and the French not letting that fly as much as other countries.

Depends. They also like to watch you to awkwardly stammer through your hardly recognizable French sentence just to reply in perfect English (or even your mother tongue in border regions).

I'm French and foreign languages are one of my hobbies. I'm proficient in English and Spanish. I can at a lower level speak some Russian, German, Czech, and Italian.

Imho the fault lies in our education system which puts a heavy accent on STEM studies and tends to treat anything outside of that as lesser subjects.

Also from anecdotal evidence the younger generations are quite better than the older ones.

In France they are known for this thing with their language where anything that doesn't sound like parisine french they call it "patois" (I think I wrote it correctly?). You probably won't have this problem if you go to the south of France.

Ive had to drive through quebec so many times. My french isn't the best but i will try and communicate with someone for either food or directions. It blows my mind at how some people can just tell you are english and then they stop talking to you or they get this disgusting look on their face.

Were you being paid to watch that episode of The IT Crowd where they call French tech support?

Ah the good old english loyalists hiding on their mountain hoping the dirty french peasants won't touch them.

Some places in africa, and some islands in the indian, and pacific oceans?

The cajuns and acadians in the USA beside the obvious that have already been named.