DR MRS VANDERTRAMPP
I have not posted in a while! French classes started back up and I've been quite occupied with it.
One big change in the last month or so is that I can finally really understand (some) television/comedy. Not all of it, not all the time, but actually finding something entertaining means it can be a form of recreation rather than just, effectively, homework.
A parody of reality dating shows. Everyone is trying to have good energy (belle energie), every contestant is somehow a barman/fireman (pompier) and is trying to charm their way into being Prince Charming (prince charmant).
Duolingo was really important early on, but languages live in the context of those that speak it in a given place. Duolingo doesn't know the Quebecois:
- Really don't use some words common in France (like sympa to mean "nice")
- Expressions that could mean the opposite of the meaning in France - par exemple or "for example", can actually mean a counterexample! Same for ecoeurant (QC: delicious, FR: disgusting)
- Straight-up whole groups of words are not used verbally basically ever, e.g., futur simple.
My actual favorite recent example is the word for "suburb". In Quebec, it's la banlieue - almost literally "the good place" - and is considered by some to be fairly desirable. In France the word is more frequently associated with slums.
And the form of learning is different. Duolingo is going to throw examples at you until you get a concept, as if it's training a machine learning/AI model [[1]]. Duolingo cannot teach you a song and will not give you any handy tricks for memorizing a general concept like silly acronyms.
Another big change is that, at the level the class is now at, we are being asked to present ourselves in ways that are decidedly non-trivial. One example that stands out is a game we did for new employees at the last place I worked - Two Truths and A Lie - where you give an audience three stories, they ask questions, you respond, and they vote on which is not true. I love this. I am firmly of the opinion that you cannot call yourself bilingual without being able to lie in that second language.
Anyway, other stuff has happened of course. I still go to the local trivia night:
And it is still summer, so well worth going and wandering around, there is still a ton of city left to explore.
Old Port of course boasts more than a few very old churches. It is not for nothing that Mark Twain called Montreal "the city of a hundred bell towers". Only about 35% of the inhabitants still call themselves Catholic - "go back in time to the 17th century" maybe isn't a huge selling point, that century sucked ass [Wikipedia].
Protip for Seattle city planners - you can do this instead of making another highway on your waterfront.
Not to be confused with the movement of the dozen or so of the least intelligent online reactionaries, Trad Festival Montreal is quite literally a festival of traditional music and performances. We wandering into the local library/community center and watched a show that was musical with frequent interludes for traditional stories and historical context. Plenty of adults but seemingly aimed for children - certainly a benefit at our level of French comprehension.
Oh and I forgot a pride photo from the previous post:
[[1]]: At a very basic level that is how these things work - you have a (hopefully) enormous set of examples and you divide them into a training set you give to the model and a test set so you can validate how well it learned a thing
