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.
How about you, are you bilingual? How bilingual?
Very, it’s just that French isn’t my other language. As with so many other immigrants, English isn’t my first language. In my case, it is the third one.
And given the amount of work I know it takes to master foreign language, I’m not in a hurry to add a fifth such as French.
Same here … except my language is Indigenous … my first language is Ojibwe-Cree which both my parents spoke and English was our second language. For the first ten years of my life I only spoke my language and English was a foreign language.
As an adult that’s only used English now for most of my life it’s the other way around … I now speak more English than Ojibwe because there’s only a few hundred people that still speak my language and my specific dialect.
I’m still fluent in my first language … I just don’t have anyone to speak to.
Thanks for sharing your story. As distant as our background is, I have the same problem of not really having anybody with whom to practice my native language on a regular basis.
On the other hand I’m grateful to all the people who have put the effort to learn English, giving people like me a chance to learn something from them, which wouldn’t happen otherwise.
I’ve completed the CCC test working for the federal government earlier this year. So in theory I am totally bilingual.
That being said, whenever any francophone hears my Anglo accent, they switch to English “for me”, meaning I can never just practice like I did when I was preparing for my tests at work.
I actually had my first positive franco-interaction in the wild just last month. Like a full interaction with a random person where they never switched to English after hearing my accent.
I was in Chelsea after hiking in Gatineau park, and someone pulled up their car next to me and asked me where a certain street was, and I told them “sorry, I don’t know, I’m not from around here”. It’s a small thing, but it felt good knowing it was the first time that had happened.
As someone from the GTA, I can tell you that no amount of mandatory French class will make you bilingual if you aren’t using it outside of that class or are in an immersion program. I took French all the way through grade 12 but I can barely hold a conversation now because I’ve had no reason to use it since.
I’m from B.C. and only grade 7 is mandatory so that’s all I took. Outside of that class, French was nonexistent and was a huge reason I didn’t care about it. I regret not sticking it out, especially now that I live in a French community in Ontario.
I grew up in Alberta and was forced to take french from grades 1-6 and I believe it was an option from grade 7 onward. Most of my french teachers sucked at teaching, didn’t know the language that well, or just didn’t care. I know my french sucks and I can hardly string a few words together, however I can understand a lot more when spoken to me, and I can figure out 70% while reading it. Just don’t ask me to wright in french.
However I drove across Canada this summer and I apparently know enough to get fuel while in Quebec!
12 day streak in Spanish on Duolingo. So getting there!
