Zeke

Hello folks! I recently found out about a program where I live in Canada called the Explore program, which provides a bursary for Canadian students (you have to have been a full time student for at least one term of the previous year before applying) to attend an immersion program at a Canadian university. It sounds really awesome and I'd only have to pay for travel to get wherever the university is and an application fee. The person who told me about it said that she did it before and it was a really great experience, although she said she wished she had gone to a school in a town with less english speaking people, because the place she did it in she found she ended up still speaking english a lot (especially with other people in the program). This is my last year of my Master's program so I'm really excited about the possibility of ending it off with an experience like this! There are even subsidiary programs in some areas that let you apply for a job in the same area to continue your immersion after the program ends. Do you know of programs like this where you are that help people to afford immersion programs in French? Or, if you've done something like this yourself, do you have any advice or experiences you want to share? My main worry is that my French won't be good enough by the time I go and I'll stumble around for most of the time I'm there. I did some French during high school and my first couple years of university, but it's been a few years so I have forgotten a lot of it and only recently started to pick it up again on my own. I'm sure I'll be super anxious when the time comes around. But, on the plus side, I have enough time to prepare that I'll be able to get some practice in on my own and work on improving my vocabulary before I go. I'm thinking of applying mainly to schools in Quebec so I guess I'll also have to look up and learn some of the differences involved in Quebecois french.

I'm Canadian and our second official language is French. This means that whenever you are applying for any kind of job involving interacting with people, having both French and English will put you ahead of other applicants who only have one language or the other. Some jobs, especially government positions or positions in more bilingual cities such as Ottawa, actually require you to have at least basic skills in both languages. I currently work in a customer service position in a smaller city a couple hours away from Ottawa and we have French speakers come through all the time. I would love to be able to get confident enough in my abilities to speak to them properly! I also have some friends who go to party in Montreal occasionally, which is also just a few hours away by train from where I live. I've heard that Montreal has a lot of English speakers for a city in Quebec, but I'd also like to be confident enough not to worry about finding someone who speaks English when I eventually go with them for a visit! The nightlife is supposed to be pretty excellent... I guess more broadly I feel like learning new languages generally is a great way to broaden your access to communicating with different people and enjoying different cultural works than you would have access to otherwise. So another reason why I'd like to get a better understanding of French is because I enjoy French media, like music and movies and books, and would love to get to a place where I can enjoy those things without constantly needing to check google translate.

My favorite French movie is also the first one I ever watched! It's a musical called Les Chansons D'Amour. I'm not sure how, but a few years back I ended up stumbling upon this video of one of the songs from early in the film (there are subtitles but some of them are kind of off, just as a heads up). I'd never heard of a movie that talked about a three-way relationship before and enjoyed the song so I managed to find a copy online to watch. The subtitles that I found were absolutely terrible so I kept having a weird dissonance where what I got from the lines were different from what I was reading but besides that I found it a really fun but also sweet / heart-wrenching movie.

Right now I'm really focusing on getting back into learning French after taking a long absence due to being so busy with school. I feel so out of practice, it's made me very self conscious about my speaking abilities. After I get into a routine of self-teaching though I'd love to add other languages to my repertoire. I'm especially interested in learning American Sign Language.