Comment by numpad0
No offense, but sometimes an annoying aspects of monolingual people(those without substantial second language training, not just ** monolingualism totaritarianists) is that sometimes the only aspect of the concept of a language some of them understand is words.
About 30% each of English vocabulary is to have been borrowed from French. That means the phrase "it's all French to me" in free standing could logically imply that you do have good idea of what is being said. That's obviously never the case.
That's because dictionary vocabulary is just an asset file for a language. It's a major, but still a part of a language. Integrating bunch of words into a language only inflates that dataset.
Dinitrogen tetroxide(N2O4) is apparently called "tetraoksid diazota" in Russian. Do memorizing bunch of those compounds in Russian makes you fluent in that language? I'd very much doubt it.
> That means the phrase "it's all French to me" in free standing could logically imply that you do have good idea of what is being said.
It is not logical to infer that because a word is derived from another language that you'd have any chance of understanding it. The phrase just is a cute recognition of the same derivation.
But you seem to imply monolanguage speakers think the opposite! I strongly suspect this is true of multi-language speakers that learned language through formal techniques. Language is so universal you cannot expect people to be ignorant of its complexity despite their never descending to its depths.
But I'd also like to point out French is occasionally quite understandable. It's when french falls into simple phrases that it becomes unintelligible. As an analytic language it's nearly as easy to decipher as latin is, although orthography is very difficult to learn.