Chapter 3: En Francais, s’il vous plait.

I thought today I’d start to talk about some of my classes. I haven’t said much about them yet because until around the three-week mark I haven’t attended enough classes to know enough about them.

So, I thought I’d start with the French class, mostly since that’s my largest class, with about 16 students from the different majors. The first two days the class was taught entirely in French, but the third included a fair amount of English because I think there were a few students who were flat-out lost. Those of us who had taken Spanish in high school were the most lost because, as I’m told, in Spanish you pronounce all words in their entirety, whereas in French you drop off the last letter of more or less every word. You can see how there might be some confusion.

Before coming to Montreal, there had been a sort of general understanding amongst my friends and I that learning French wouldn’t really be necessary because everyone here spoke English. NOT TRUE. Montreal is basically French on the east half and English on the west half, and we’re located just inside the border of the French half. Most of the people you hear on the street are speaking French, and at many of the business the employees speak English only as a second language. All the lessons at UQAM are taught in French, as opposed to McGill or Concordia, where the lessons are in English. Our ‘Conversational French’ class, though a little bit of a crash-course in the beginning, is so far proving a good way to learn basic interaction in French.

We’ve already learned several useful phases, like ‘I’m cold’ or ‘I’m hungry’ and we’re in the process of leaning all the numbers, how to say the date, tell time, ask the time, and say ‘Do you speak English?’, which will probably be the most useful of them all! (Parlez-vous l’anglais?). This class is particularly useful for me because I live with two girls from Southern France who speak only very basic English, and many of their friends who come to hang out in our apartment speak only French. Some of my friends from Champlain who live on the 5^th floor have started hanging out with Francophone students, so knowing at least a little bit French can go a long way. I had to help a kid out with the washing and drying machines in the Laundry room, and just knowing how to say ‘put this there and put that there’ can be super explanatory if you point to all the right things.

I hope to eventually become more or less bilingual, though not in just one semester- it takes many years to pull that off. To work in a retail-type Montreal you need to be able to speak either French or English fluently, and then have a basic grasp of your second language. For a more specialized job like teaching or office-based work, you need to speak both languages well, as far as I can tell.

And next week, I think I’ll speak of the advantages of taking Advanced Seminar or Earth Science while abroad in Montreal!