I was very lucky growing up, and my little middle school in my little village in Nova Scotia offered French Immersion (late, started grade 7).
Sure, some of my teachers were anglophone, but the rest were Acadian. When I went to university I didn’t think much about it, but soon discovered that I was functionally and operationally bilingual. I continued to study French at university where all of my teachers happend to be from la belle province and graduated.
Now I’m a professor in France. I’ve been doing this for about 17 years. My students greatly underestimate their level in English, yet here I am correcting 750-word essays written by 1st year students who have only “studied” English for an hour or two a week since middle school. Are they good? Meh… But they are better than they imagine.
Canada is supposed to be bilingual. I’ve seen different numbers fly around over the years regarding the percentage of bilingual Canadians. How about you, are you bilingual? How bilingual?
Addendum:
These maps are not directly related to the question, but I came across them while looking things up.
This is from 2016. I like showing this to my students. They always ask me why I bothered learning French.
And this is from 2021 and is a little bit related to my question, but only covers English and French.
Northern Ontario. Fully fluent in French and English, written, spoken, and between the lines. French Catholic schooling. French at home and at work. I realize I am the exception.
I agree with other comments on here, like many other skills, if you don’t use it everyday that skill will rust over time.
Here’s poster that shows French language schools across Canada. It is rather dated but it may somewhat answer the question.
I’m from Québec and fluent in both French and English (spoken and written).
I went through an exclusively French curriculum (with interspersed English and Spanish classes in both high school and cegep). University was mostly in English.
At home, we spoke mostly in 2 other languages (still speak well enough but unfortunately I never learned to write in) with both sides of the family, with English as a go between when needed.
I was nowhere any good in any of my language classes, frequently zeroes (out of 10 or 100) in written quizzes and tests (I tended to write phonetically). I don’t know how I (barely) passed without ever failing a single class 🤣. I am better now, probably out of lifelong practice.
I was way better, if not excellent, in mathematics, physics, chemistry and most sciences in general.
What probably helped was my continuous daily immersion in both French and English with friends, family, coworkers, colleagues, clients, neighbors and also through shows, movies, music, books, journals, contracts and various projects.
Although, nowadays, I personnaly feel (false impression perhaps) like my English vocabulary is vastly larger than my French one.
In my 30s, took 12 years of french immersion and retained almost none of it :/
I also had a hard time with english so it’s not like I was picking sides, some people just suck at languages and I am one of them.
20 no-French years since college and whatever french I had is gone. Helped in the army, though, as in the west the sargeants assume everyone’s anglo scum.
