Passed tests, failed rebellions

B R

B R

— 4 min read
Passed tests, failed rebellions
Credit: The Onion

Le cours numéro 1 est terminé!

The exams consisted of four parts:

  • Production orale (speaking): Randomly chosen partners have two conversations. I was most worried about this, but a little practice was allowed first and we could choose out of three topics so it was cool.
  • Compréhension lire/Production ecrit (writing): Reading/writing is not a focus of the beginner course, so this was just simple fill-in-a-form and write-a-check stuff (though I had a lot more practice with the check writing than the younger folks).
  • Compréhension orale: Watch four videos - public service stuff mostly - answer some questions about each. This turned out to be, by far, the hardest exam. Much of the vocabulary is unfamiliar and the speech is incomprehensibly fast.

An example of the kind of video, though this person genuinely is easier to understand. Gaspésie seems to be the go-to roadtrip destination for the Quebecois.

But I passed. Most folks did. There was a lovely little party on the last day, potluck style with dancing, photos of which I will not post here for privacy's sake. But I will post the gift some friends and I cobbled together for the professor.

"Manualito" - I do not know the actual name of the character in Paw Patrol - was the frequent subject for new vocabulary. I can take basically no credit for this gift, other than chipping in for the frame. My friends in the class are exceptionally resourceful.

While on the subject of the french language I will mention three tech related things:

  1. Google translate sucks
No, this isn't an instance where the word hasn't been reclaimed by the community. Hell the official Montréal tourism website has a Queer MTL section. This is just Google training with a bigoted corpus and failing to do any manual testing.
  1. Usually the borrowed words in English go harder than the French translation - demander just means "to ask" and detester just means "to not like" for example. Here is an exception that threw me while reading the newspaper:
Hell yeah
  1. The various text generation algorithms currently in vogue are not great for language purposes, particularly proofreading.
The last day in the computer lab we were playing around with various versions of GPT et al with the professor. He threw some very incorrect writing at them and they consistently failed to find all the problems with the text (Je mange beaucoup de poulet).

There was about a week break between the courses - next time it'll be more like five weeks during the summer - and the weather mostly sucked so I stayed in. But just today it was a balmy 19C (~66F) so I went on a nice bike ride to Parc La Fontaine.

This is slightly faster than the metro and about as fast as driving (sans parking - good luck on that). I only wished I lived in that restaurant but it's fairly close.

The park is named for Louis-Hippolyte La Fontaine, a Canadian politician that managed to squeeze out some democratic concessions from the British Empire after the failed rebellions in 1837 by working with the other (West/English) side of Canada.

It's worth briefly mentioning how fucked up elections were in the 1840s everywhere. Private ballots weren't a thing and votes were routinely bought. When this guy tried to get his supporters to the polls in an English-speaking majority town, a mob formed with clubs and firearms and effectively stole the election with violence ("there was blood on the snow").

People came out for the modestly good weather. Several retired guys with electric bikes brought a six pack of beer and had fairly animated conversations like a French Canadian version of the street on King of the Hill or something.

It's still really early spring so the park wasn't much to look at quite yet, but the ride down was lovely and gave me a good notion as to what a commute would look like if I didn't take the metro every day (in short: good).

Only maybe 50% of the other bikers wore helmets and 0% of them signaled. Which makes some sense when you consider you would need to go out of your way to NOT find/use a protected bike lane. Pictured above is a typical road that was converted to 1-way in order to accommodate the bike lane.

Dog tax:

Caught mid-yawn.

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