When I was 12, my father signed me up for a distance learning program in French. It was very successful in imparting to me a detailed and sophisticated knowledge of the French grammar but you can’t learn to speak if all you do is write and read.
When I moved to the French-speaking Quebec a decade later, I was hoping to buff up my conversational French but I met with reluctance and mockery of the native population. Today, I’m a different person but back then I was a painfully shy little wallflower and didn’t react well to people laughing at me. It’s strange because in Ukraine, which is also a country battling to preserve its language from a larger, more dominant culture, if a foreigner says even just a couple of words in Ukrainian, he’ll be feted and love-bombed but in Quebec it’s nothing of the kind.
I tried enrolling in French courses at the university but ran into the problem of the proficiency test. Once she saw my answers on the test, the French professor said, “You are a native speaker. You don’t need language courses because your French is perfect.” I tried to explain that I’m the opposite of a speaker. I can conjugate flawlessly but I can’t say sentences. I tried to demonstrate my speaking impotence by speaking in my very faulty French but the professor was convinced I’m faking it to get easy credit and I was banished. This is how I ended up in a situation where I can read and enjoy Maupassant in the original and understand people speaking about Maupassant but can’t say, “Excuse me, where are the toilets?”
Clarissa's Blog 
“ran into the problem of the proficiency test”
A vaguely similar thing happened to an American friend who worked a few years in Poland during communism. Someone had gone over the alphabet and the sounds of Polish. She was pretty fluent in French and bits and pieces of another language or two and so she was able to look at something and pronounce it out loud without an obvious American accent.
When she went for a course the teacher asked her to…. read out loud from a beginning coursebook. The teacher then insisted she was very advanced and explanations like “I know how to pronounce the alphabet but I have no idea what any of the words I just read mean…” did not go far and they sent to a course where she understood nothing and she quit.
I always suspected that it was less mistaking her level of competence and more a matter of discouraging an outsider from learning too much. Poland was a lot more open to foreigners than the USSR (openly encouraged foreigners, especially the diaspora, to visit and spend money as long as they weren’t too political) but there were limits….
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That reminds me of the kid in my high school French class who was from Quebec. He had the opposite problem. He could speak it really well. But he could only read and write in English (his family had moved when he was small). He was placed into a class two years above his own but while he spoke circles around everyone he just didn’t have the grammar background.The thing is at that level we were starting to focus more on reading and writing. He was expecting an easy class. He did not do as well as he thought he would.
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Québécois sound so different than French speakers in Paris (dominant dialect.) French language courses specify those regions.
Do Parisians just start speaking English at French Canadians when they visit France?
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I have heard from Quebecers that they do in fact so this. Which is especially frustrating when the Quebecer in question can’t really speak English.
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So different. In fact, a friend visiting from. France was repeatedly told that nobody understood him. He finally had to switch to English and then everybody understood.
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Clarissa
“…in Quebec it’s nothing of the kind.”
My hunch is that to some degree it may depend upon where you are. My spoken French is far worse than the most broken English, but outside of Quebec City, most people have tolerated my Oatmeal-Savagering of their language. Now, the idiotic language bureaucrats, somehow incensed by your very presence in Québec, now that can be a problem…identity politics and inferior complexes always suck ;-D
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And in a far different outlook, Cajun women wondering when they’ll see their men back from the Alberta oilpatch ;-D
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The existence of youtube has been an incredible blessing. I can listen to French every day even though there are relatively few French speakers where I live. Listening is not the same thing as conversation, of course, but it’s much closer to it than reading is.
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