Just jumping in and speaking a new language is a great way to beat your fear of embarrassing yourself. Which is a major barrier when learning a language.
Rick, you said you went to French immersion, but you probably had regular French as a second language classes in addition to the immersion. What helped you the most in learning the language? Or did it work at all?
Hi Guys
I haven’t been on this board in almost two months, and haven’t dropped by this thread in a while, but our robo-scandal made me do it. That and a couple of anecdotes.
Anecdote the first. My boyfriend actually worked for RMG in Thunder Bay, not during the federal election, but for the Ontario campaign this fall. (Stop gap income between doing contracts of his own for businesses.) Again RMG had a Conservative phone contract. He worked a total of 9 shifts before quitting in disgust. The spin on the foreign workers program was incredibly misleading, and he said he felt completely disgusting doing it. (To say he is not Conservative is a bit of an understatement.) Also they had trouble with their equipment, servers, etc, spent part of every day twiddling thumbs and waiting for the dialers to be working again. He is bilingual, and the day he ended up calling his home town…a small mainly French city in Northern Ontario and talking to people he had known all his life spouting misleading rhetoric was the day he found another contract and quit RMG) The training and caliber of the staff at that place tends to be really bad and retention low, so when you hear that about RMG it is the truth. Lets just say we know some of the employees personally and some he had let go from his business a few years ago.
Anecdote the second. Last Friday Dalton McGuinty was in Thunder Bay, showing up at among other places, a biotech firm where the boyfriend is currently doing a call contract. I drove him to work, he discovered he had forgotten his keys, we left, backtracked a block to get a coffee and go to the gas station. I was followed by an ugly old pickup truck, which was in front of two black sedans. There was no logical reason anyone would ever take the route I did, and 4 cars, (me, truck, two black sedans) followed me. I didn’t care, I realize there was some kind of security in place before the Premier’s visit, but it was funny. About as subtle as a sledgehammer and twice as graceful. We were some bagpipes and clowns short of a parade. Combining that with the fact I got a traffic ticket, had my BC nursing license criminal record check completed, and crossed the boarder, I wonder how many times either myself or my license plates were checked this week. I hope its not like a credit score where too many checks is bad for your overall rating…
Thirdly, I am moving to Vancouver next week, so to all my doper friends look for me in the ROC soon…
Wow! Someone really thinks they are very important, don’t they? I wonder how many/often death threats are lobbed in the direction of the Premier of Ontario?
Not enough.
Turks and Caicos – just a matter of time. 
I’m a skier, and we’re in Canada. Too bad neither of us is gay.
Why would I have taken “French as a second language courses” if I was in an immersion program?
What would have helped me would be, you know, explaining what the hell was going on. Simply instructing history, georgraphy et al. in French, and teaching French as if to Francophones, worked for some kids but not at all for me; it tooks years to catch up. What would have helped me was an explanation; “here are some basic rules.”
A good example would be conjugating avoir and etre. We had to memorize that and I managed to do that… without actually knowing what avoir and etre mean. It took me months to figure THAT out, so what I had were a set of words that had no meaning to me and so couldn’t be used in a way that was anything more than random. Had someone started off saying “Okay, look; avoir' means to have, and etre’ means to be. Think about how those words change in English depending on whether you’re saying I am, you are, and it’s like that in French. Okay, here we go” I would have been weeks and weeks ahead. To me, immersion was like handing someone a set of equations to solve without explaining arithmetic.
But that’s how I learn; give me a reason, a concept, and I’ll take off with it.
Interesting. I learned French the scholarly way, and always thought I’d have been better off just speaking the language instead of learning tenses and conjugations, etc. I will admit though that I still have a very good foundation and if I was immersed in French now I would pick it up reasonably quickly. I’ve been on the north side of Montreal a few times this winter on business and even asked for directions once, but I did feel rather uneasy about it.
My son is in immersion and is really struggling, not so much with French, but learning what he’s supposed to be learning, because it’s being taught in French: geography, for example. We may pull him out next year.
Certainly we all learn differently. Unfortunately schools seem to have an even bigger “cookie cutter” approach now than they did when we were in school.
In the school board’s defense, they have to make the decision to cancel buses before the first child is picked up in the morning. If they bus them to school, they have to bus them home.
So, sometimes they have to cancel buses with incomplete information.
And the weatherpeople have gone insane in calling things ‘storms’ when they are mild snowfalls or ‘freezing rain’ when it is well above zero (we had a 9 degree day last week that called for freezing rain).
It is also perfectly reasonable to cancel buses but not school depending on the school. At our school only about 10 kids are bussed in grades K-6. So, it makes sense for the kids who can walk to school to do so (since walking in the snow is pretty safe whereas driving less so).
Have I mentioned recently that I’m on a first-name basis with Mayor Nenshi?
This was also back in the day when fights in hockey were twice as common as they are now.
A further problem is that in some cases the various boards/schools may be sharing buses based on a staggered start/end school day. An initial 10 minute delay due to weather could easily propagate across the entire network and result in delays far in excess of the original slow down.
My wife and I just have the kids walk on days the buses are canceled but school is open. 
Back in the day, my mother, as a toddler, made a daily grocery trip from Milltown to St. Stephen and back by dog cart and dog sled. Just her and Jinx the dog, who knew where to go.
It appears that times have changed, what with busses for everything and kids under constant supervision.
Of course back in my day, one of my fellow students drove off with us in the intercity Grey Coach bus when the driver stepped out briefly, and kids routinely jumped out the back door of the yellow school bus when it slowed for turns, so perhaps not all hope is lost.
How far do you think I’d get with a campaign to get rid of school and playground zones, on the basis that kids are never allowed to set foot on a public sidewalk without a parent with them?
But I’ve had lots of systemics. What I didn’t have was actual use. And Benny admits that he studies the language every day. It’s the hardcore immersion that’s new to many.
Best way to learn French in Canada is to surround yourself in French. Same goes for any language really. I was lucky, I grew up in Quebec the kids were friendly and when your one Anglophone with 10 other kids playing street hockey who are Francophone, majority rules. Then dating a women who spoke very little english later on for 2 years helped a lot. When I watch hockey I try to watch it in French to make sure I don’t lose it. My written French isn’t that strong however.
I don’t know, Rick. I don’t know how French immersion programs work in Ontario. I’d assumed that your classes would have been in French, but that you’d also have had French language classes intended for non-native speakers to help you get up to speed. I guess it’s not the case, since your complaint is that your French classes seemed to be built on the assumption that you already spoke the language.
Just one question: did you start French immersion in a later grade than the other students? This could explain why they didn’t do basic vocabulary with your class. Anyway, it’s probably a good idea to teach vocabulary even to immersion students. What I wonder is how you managed to follow your other classes if you didn’t know what avoir and être mean.
But in any case, if you’re an adult and go the “just jump in” method of language learning, and are motivated, you’ll learn the vocabulary you need as you go along.
No, I started like everyone else.
It’s French IMMERSION. The idea is that you just are dropped into a place where French is spoken and you learn from that. We were just expected to learn the hard way, and we struggled along being incessantly corrected by the teacher.
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Certainly we all learn differently. Unfortunately schools seem to have an even bigger “cookie cutter” approach now than they did when we were in school.
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I am pleased to note my child’s experience is precisely the opposite of that. Her classroom, school and teacher are almost absurdly more varied, encriched, and skilled than anything I ever saw in elementary school (in the immersion program or out.) The improvement is positively amazing.
Hey, Calgarians, my brother-in-law is going to be on the CTV 6:00 News tomorrow, on a Lea Williams-Doherty segment talking about the dvd scam of having the digital copy you paid for expire without your knowledge!
Rob Anders embarrasses western Conservatives again. Please believe me when I say this waste of skin does not speak for most westerners; I honestly can’t tell you why his constituents in Calgary West keep voting for this idiot.