Retirees RSS

You can retire to the Dordogne, join a community so thoroughly British that locals half-jokingly call parts of it 'Dordogneshire,' and live for years on minimal French — entire village social calendars run in English in some areas. So why bother learning the language at all?Because retirement isn't a few months — it's years, often the rest of your life. And France, more than almost anywhere else on this list, has a real cultural expectation around making the effort: a genuine, if imperfect, attempt at French tends to be met with noticeably warmer reception than coasting in English, especially outside...