NaDruWriNi 2018 Chapter Four: A Country Divided

[the_siobhan]

Current alcohol count: I am never going to finish this fucking g&t, seriously he made it in a pint glass.

elusis brought up learning French in my languages post and reminded me of something that has pissed me off for decades.

In theory, Canada is a bilingual country. In reality, we have one bilingual province, (New Brunswick, population approximately 750K) and one bilingual city. (Montreal, population approximately 1.7 million) When I call them bilingual I mean that most of the population speaks both languages. The rest of the country speaks either English or French but not both.

Two of my co-workers speak to each other in Punjabi when they are trying to figure something out quickly and it's just the two of them because it's so much faster. This led to a conversation with one of them about how many languages he speaks. (Five) "But you speak French, don't you? I thought in Canada you all learn to speak French."

I don't know about the rest of the country, but let me tell you about French education in Toronto.

I started off in Scarborough, which is one of the suburbs of Toronto. There they started French classes in grade 6. (I would have been 12.) An hour long class, once a week.

Halfway through grade 6 I moved to Toronto proper, where they start French classes in Grade 4. Two hours a week now. Since I was obviously two years behind I had no idea what was going on and my teacher made it very clear she had no interest in catching me up. I literally did not learn a single word. I tried a couple of times in High School but... well as previously explained I don't have a language brain and it didn't really take.

The fucked up thing is that I have friends who did French immersion when they were growing up. (That's a school where every class is taught in French.) They are completely proficient in French - as long as they are speaking to somebody from France. Because apparently Quebecois French, the language spoken by the largest French-speaking population in Canada, is completely different than the French that is taught in our schools.

This blows my mind. That you can go to a French school in Canada and they will teach you French - but not the French that is actually spoken in your own country.

My sister actually went through something similar when she was living in Switzerland. She took German classes to try to become proficient enough to get a job while she was there, but the only language classes she could take were in High German. Not in the Swiss German that was actually spoken in Zurich where she lived. So even if she passed the course with flying colours she wouldn't be employable because she wouldn't be able to communicate with her co-workers who were all speaking Swiss German.

I don't get it.

You know what? Fuck both official languages. Rightfully we should all be learning Cree and Inuktitut anyway.

I wonder how hard they are to learn.

Comments

[sabotabby]

They are very hard to learn. We should probably start with the kids, when their brains are more flexible. But we should start right away.

I thought starting French in Grade 3 was bad! I'm not sure when it started in York Region but I always felt like I was playing catch-up and never got confident about it.

[the_siobhan]

I am mad on D's behalf that his mother never taught him French. She didn't speak English at home until she got married, but she never passed it on to any of her children.

Mind you, in the 60's the popular thinking was that being exposed to multiple languages would just "confuse" children.

[elusis]

Thank goodness times have changed. My friends S & N are native English speaking white people, but they live in the Mission in SF. Both had some Spanish but upon deciding to have children, did some immersion classes to improve their skills, and thereupon deliberately *only spoke to their daughter in Spanish* for the first two years of her life. It helps that when they both went back to work, her daycare was with a Spanish speaking woman, but still - they were DISCIPLINED about this. I babysat for the sprog a few times and would be rushing around looking up nouns or using broken Spanglish while my English-only partner tried to keep up.

They assumed, and were 100% correct, that she would get plenty of English from her environment - even living in the Mission - to develop it as well. They sent her to a mixed English/Spanish pre-school, and lo and behold, she tested able to go to a Spanish-language kindergarten this year. Kid is growing up bilingual and it will serve her for the rest of her life - my few bilingual Spanish students can command a premium at the rare paying jobs around here while interns.

If I reproduced, I don't know that I'd be that disciplined. But I sure as hell see the value. (FFS, it made their choices of caregivers so much broader that she and they speak Spanish).

[elusis]

Also, Duolingo does not teach Quebecois French and I've no idea what would make it unintelligible to contenental French speakers, but that's terrifying. No wonder they want to secede.

[the_siobhan]

From what I understand they speak the working-class version of the language that was current in the 16th & 17th century. Plus some added slang, colloquialisms, and pronunciations that were borrowed from working class English, local indigenous languages and some additional random stuff that developed independently. Quebecois speakers can usually understand Parisian speakers but not so much the other way around.

(True story, I have a Scottish friend who learned French while living in Paris and who is now living in Montreal. So he speaks Parisian French with a thick Scottish accent. Seeing the expressions on the faces of the Quebecois who hear him for the first time is a truly glorious thing.)

I had a conversation with a taxi driver who was from Algiers who was able to immigrate to Canada on strength of being a French speaker. (You get a lot of points for speaking one of the official languages.) But when he arrived in Montreal he couldn't understand the locals. He said he decided if he was going to have to learn another language he wanted it to be English so he moved to Toronto.

[conuly]

People still think that today, which is ridiculous.

[nicklausse]

My French teacher at UC Riverside was a dude called Thierry Grassioulet, who hailed from Lyon and smoked unfiltered Gauloises Blondes. He was an adjunct, apparently, because the university booted him after five years but kept the curriculum he designed, whereafter he threatened to sue. Instead he declared bankruptcy and taught English in Korea for many years, and now I've just looked him up, he's back in Boston.

Amazing teacher. Kindred soul.

Bc he was awesome I have better French than Dave (but mostly writing/reading, not spoken due to lack of practice). Apparently Calgary just wasn't interested.

[conuly]

In the US, a lot of schools teach Spain Spanish instead of any of the Spanishes used in the New World. I did a Spanish class with a lot of kids who ought to have been in the Spanish for Native Speakers class. They spent an awful lot of time saying "But no, we don't say that, we say this!" It's not almuerzar, it's comer lonche! It's not el coche, it's el carro! On and on and on and on. I just read my Latin while they argued.

[redbird]

We got mostly Castilian (in my New York City school in the 1970s). I didn't notice anything odd at the time, because the only things written in Spanish that I wanted to read (i.e., not textbooks) were the poems of Pablo Neruda, and his Spanish was close to what I had learned.

Fortunately, when I started living in upper Manhattan in the late '80s, my Dominican neighbors were willing to meet me halfway, or more than halfway. Later, I understood the long telenovela PSA saga of Juan and Marisol, and could mostly understand El Diario/La Prensa, though my actually buying a copy, not just reading the headlines on other commuters' newspapers, surprised the man at the bodega downstairs. (The headline was about Subcommandante Marcos and the rebellion in Chiapas, and I knew there wouldn't be significant coverage in the local English-language papers).

[conuly]

Life isn't worth living if you can't surprise the storekeepers now and again!

[the_siobhan]

I do wonder how much variation there is. I know Duolingo is teaching me the Spain Spanish, but I figure it's probably a good starting point if I end up in any country that speaks a dialect.

[conuly]

Of course, what they speak in Spain is also a dialect.

[redbird]

Now I am wondering if there's any way I could learn Quebec French (which is what I would actually use) other than spending a few months in Montreal and enrolling in classes there, which I'm not likely to do.

[the_siobhan]

You know, I honestly don't know what they teach in the language schools there. I know they have immersion schools as well, where parents can send their kids to learn "proper" French.

[armiphlage]

I grew up in Nova Scotia learning a mixture of French from France and ACADIAN French.

People in France don't understand me.
People in Quebec don't understand me.
People in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick don't understand me.

[inulro]

Once again, Regina was surprisingly less bad than other places. French 3 x a week from age 9.

I took French all the way through high school and into university, but for academic purposes so my reading is really strong and my vocabulary skews heavily towards history, archaeology and literary topics. The first couple days we go to France I struggle every time, but it comes back really quickly.

[the_siobhan]

I was surprised to find out that Winnipeg is half French. Of course they live on the other side of the river from the English and nobody talks to each other.

[inulro]

They would speak French because they are Metis, would be my guess.

[disastrid]

The French education in Canada is embarrassing. I started at age 9 and spent years learning things like the vocabulary for outer space, like "la planète" and "le spaceship". So if aliens ever invade, and they speak French, a whole bunch of Canadian kids who grew up in the late 80s and early 90s will be there to save the day.

Also I don't know if it's a case of anyone not being able to understand different types of French, it's just that dialects can take some time getting used to; it's like saying someone from Texas and someone from, say, Glasgow or Northern Ireland won't understand one another - the accent, idioms and language use take some getting used to and at first seem unintelligible, but come on. It's not like one party is speaking Chinese. Every language contains multitudes of interpretations and uses (Germany was particularly notable for this, and holy shit the UK is ridiculous) so the best possible strategy is probably to learn the most widely-recognised version and adjust the way you speak it. Of course this gives rise to a very pertinent debate around hegemony of language - which version is the "purest", who decides that, and what does that mean about people who speak something different - but there has to be a starting point somewhere. In Spain Catalan is spoken by a huge number of people in the richest part of the country, but it's still seen as "fringe", so I'm not sure these lines are always socioeconomic.

In Germany the accent from Saxony sounds like everyone is talking with their mouths full of mashed potato and is considered really farmery and podunk, and I noticed that when an American show was dubbed into German the character who was supposed to be kind of an idiot was dubbed in a Sachsisch accent. Oh what a tangled web of signifiers we weave.

[the_siobhan]

I agree with everything you say except the bit about Glasgow. That really is a different language.

Axel found something a few years ago that said that the accent that is currently thought of as "Southern" in the USA is the closest thing we have to what the English colonists sounded like when they were first arriving in North America. I find that shit fascinating.

BC showed me an episode of Outlander a couple of weeks ago and for some reason that's the thing that my brain locked onto as unrealistic. Not the time travel. The fact everybody identifies her as English because of the way she spoke and I kept saying "that wouldn't have happened, English accents didn't sound like that back then."

[kest]

Well...I imagine there's not anything else she *does* sound like, though?

[the_axel]

Most likely they'd identify here as a foreigner who learned English but has a crazy, weird accent.

[inulro]

The elephant in the room here is the piss-poor methods they were using to teach languages when we were in school. And probably still are.

When I learned to teach English as a foreign language 10 years ago we learned the communicative approach; nothing like the way we were taught & way more effective.

[50ftqueenie]

I was in French Immersion from kindergarten up until the end of high school and while most of my teachers were from France, I did have a couple that were from Quebec. Earlier in my working life, I had a few jobs were I spoke French almost daily and always to people from Quebec, and we were generally able to understand each other. Our teachers from Quebec had us watch Quebecois TV shows and movies, which probably also helped me develop a good ear and a good accent.