Learning French Or English In Canada (6/10)

As most of you know, Canada has two offi­cial lan­guages: French and English.

Now, most of the immi­grants who are cho­sen under the skilled worker pro­gram will have to show lan­guage pro­fi­ciency in either lan­guage. But it’s not always that easy.

French And English (3/10)

The province of Quebec’s offi­cial lan­guage is French, and the province of New-Brunswick is offi­cially bilin­gual. For the other provinces and ter­ri­to­ries, it’s a bit of a grey area… Eng­lish is most widely spo­ken but there are French com­mu­ni­ties almost every­where: in Ontario (the Franco-Ontariens), in Man­i­toba, in Alberta…

Two Solitudes And One Loneliness

Not only I betrayed France by cross­ing the Atlantic Ocean, but appar­ently I also betrayed French lan­guage. Oh, that’s great.

Geographical Humour

But one thing helped to make it through the long days (that is, other than the pack of cig­a­rette I smoked and the cup of burn­ing hot cof­fee sit­ting by me on the table) : when cus­tomers called, I had to ask them for their address. And I soon dis­cov­ered Cana­di­ans had some kind of humor when it came to nam­ing places.

Summer In The City

Sum­mer usu­ally brings the worse stu­dents, along with those to busy to take classes the rest of the year and whose only chance is to come to school when the Par­lia­ment isn’t in ses­sion. I don’t mind those ones. They’re usu­ally focused on their stud­ies because they’re des­per­ate to pass their French test, which will enti­tle them to a pro­mo­tion or a pay rise. But the weirdos…

Lost In Translation

I’m los­ing my French. Too bad I’m a French teacher.

It all started when I moved to Ottawa. The city is in Ontario but the French-speaking province of Que­bec is only min­utes away, across the Ottawa River. As a result, roughly 50% of the pop­u­la­tion speaks Eng­lish and 30% of the pop­u­la­tion speaks French.

Do You Speak English?

Eng­lish wasn’t pop­u­lar. French don’t like Eng­lish much (“they put vine­gar on chips and eat meat with mint sauce !”), and the rela­tion­ship with the USA has always been a bit rocky (“these warmongers/ burgers-eaters !”), so there were basi­cally no incen­tive to learn.

The Teacher And The Test Dilemna

My stu­dents are office work­ers. I’m not — and their field of work and the arcane of the ubiq­ui­tous bureau­cracy can be bewil­der­ing for a rookie like me. Like when I was fil­ing up for another teacher last week for a Canada Rev­enue Agency class. So I came into the class, intro­duced myself and asked the stu­dents to do the same, one by one.