French not taught properly in English-speaking provinces???

[deleted]

[deleted]

As many people said here, you've got to practice in order to learn French properly. Hang out with Frenchies, watch Québec TV shows, Québec movies, listen to Québec musicm and go read the lyrics online if you don't get what the artist's saying...

I think bilinguism in Canada is more of a political thing than anything else. I mean, outside Québec and maybe New-Brunswick, you guys never have a chance to speak French. This country is so big, it's got two distinct cultures, and has always tried to mix the two together, but to no avail.

Here in Québec, French is the official language so theoretically speaking, you shouldn't *have* to speak English to get around. The Québec government has done, and is still doing, everything possible for the Québécois not to be penalized for not speaking English. It didn't stop the Québécois to learn English because it's useful in many areas of our life, especially at the international level.

You guys shouldn't be forced to learn French. You should have the choice to choose your second language. Québec and ROC will never get along anyways and it's not because ROC speaks French (a little) that Québec will step down on their intention to "divorce".

When your first language is NOT English, you're lucky because English can be picked up quite easily, and once that is done it makes 2 languages. Then a third one is even easier.

I'm proud to see you want to learn French, but as far as your Beautiful Bilingual Canada is concerned, I'm afraid your dream will never come true.

One day you'll travel to Québec and your passport will get stamped. That'll be fun!! :-)

It's because they don't teach conversational French in school. Knowing how to conjugate verbs and knowing how to speak the language are two totally different things.

Bender: I was God once.
God: Yes, I saw. You were doing well until everyone died.

Unless you're one of the small percentage of people who are naturally gifted with superb memory recall and for learning languages, no one can *teach* you how to speak a foreign language in weeks, months or even years. Wander on over to the Language Learning Forum. You'll find people from dozens of countries, with varying degrees of proficiency in many languages, and I don't think one of them thought they learned much of it in school/college (or that they ever reach real fluency unless they spend a lot of time/live in a foreign country or have regular conversations with others in the language).

Learning a language takes intensive and sustained work on a daily basis, and many people spend a few hours every day with a language program, in addition to doing supplemental reading of newspapers and novels, listening to radio and watching foreign language tv/movies.

No one acknowledges that schools can only give the bare-bones skeleton of a language in the time they have alloted to each subject and the number of students they have to teach. Because school is not the best place to study such a time-consuming subject, they can and do teach language for years without being able to impart the ability to have a conversation with a native in normal, unhalting speech. You may be able to read and write pretty proficiently after nine years, but speaking naturally and understanding the language when it's spoken at its normal pace are other skills altogether, ones that require time and daily conversation practice. 45 minutes every day spent on your own at home studying the language is much more effective than being one of many students in a classroom setting.

Yeah but the thing is , in quebec , we don't speak real french XD. we like mix english and French together and we changed words up , so we call it " Quebecois" , you're never gonna learn Quebecois in school , they show you the real french , like people in paris speak. I'm from montreal , and this summer i went to paris , and i didn't understand a word that the people there said . Of course mostly because of the accent , but still , if i would speak Quebecois , they wouldn't be able to understand me , so the things that they teach you in school is the base of real french they're not going to teach you "fake" french.

French's a hard language to learn , so it's normal that you can't use it that well.

It's the same thing we french / Quebecois people , not a lot of Quebecois are bilingual , the once that are tough are from mostly from Montreal .
Go Quebec City or trois-rivieres, and you won't find much bilingual people.

This is not exclusive to Canadian school system. There's no way you can learn to speak any language based on elementary and high school programs only without any practice/immersion outside of the classroom. It's the same for any of the subjects we learn in school. We are just taught the bare minimum just to pass some test. If I want to be fluent in the subject, I would have to study further and practice a lot.

its so true, we watched this movie in my french class today and nobody other than my teacher who is quebecois (and so far, my only french teacher that can actually speak french) understood most of the movie. I think they should actually get french teachers that can speak french, I had a teacher once who talked about things like le chicken and le driving because she couldn't remember the words in french!