1e4e6 wrote:Félicitacions I am proud that you did so well, and that you have hopes of immigrating to Québec. I have a lot of relatives there and life is really good there.
Also I did not know that you lived in San Francisco. Do you go to the Alliance Française downtown?
I do! Are you from around these parts as well?
PeterMollenburg wrote:But who are you really though? If you are simultaneously all off these characters in this, let's be frank, "masterpiece", then you should be granted a C5 level (especially created for you personally as the only person to reach such a level) in every language on Earth without having to sit any exams ever!!!
Respect man, respect
Well, I'll admit that I'm probably most like the Dave Foley character. But the whole conversation is pretty much how my internal decision-making monologue goes. Which is why I get nothing done unless I'm forced.
sctroyenne wrote:I do! Are you from around these parts as well?
I have split my life in various bits between San Francisco and Northern England. But right now, yes, I am in San Francisco. I have never been a class kind of guy so never been to the Alliance Française nor the Instituto Cervantes or anything. Where in the Bay Area are you?
I have also on and off been thinking of moving to Montréal, but no serious plans yet. I would like relatives to sponsor, but that is complicated and a big responsability. I think life would be quite nice there as well. What are your reasons for moving to Québec, if I may ask?
I'm in the East Bay and work in SF. You may be interested in their cultural events and library even if you don't take classes. I did a post about my exodus back here in my log and still pretty much feeling the same way even though the whole process might take longer than I had hoped (Quebec is becoming a popular option for people from France these days).
Congratulations! I am in awe of your achievement and I can't wait for you to post more about your journey (and new ones of course). Welcome to Canada (or Quebec as I'm sure they'll remind you ).
I promised to talk about the methods that worked for me moving up to C2 level after I posted my test results. Soon after that post I got a second job so I've had very little free time but little by little I've finally come up with something.
Background and increasing exposure: After coming back from France in Summer 2012 I worked for a while and I started to become concerned that my English to foreign language ratio was getting out of balance especially with trying to learn 3 languages. I had already been reading and using apps for language learning on public transit but I wasn't speaking and listening very much.
My goal became to squeeze out as much English as I could and the easiest way was to increase general exposure to French my strongest language in listening comprehension (and everything else for that matter). Listening allows for multitasking if your comprehension level is good enough or the other task you're doing is mindless enough. I used a tracking app (ATracker) to start tracking my time separated by various language learning tasks which became pretty motivating (my HTLAL log featured my monthly reports). I started listening to podcasts all day at work and while walking to and from transit. I would come home and watch more streaming French (as well as Irish). I was able to track multiple hours of foreign language exposure and activities a day (some months a daily average of 8 hours).
Non-fiction I took some upper level, themed, and private lessons from time to time and got exposed to a lot of higher level/academic non-fiction (Christian Grataloup, Emile Durkheim, Tzvetan Todorov, etc). I had library borrowing privileges and I took advantage of the opportunity to read some more nonfiction that would otherwise be difficult and expensive to have access to.
I started reading a lot of news online thanks to my Facebook stream filled with news pages and the Pocket app which allowed me to save articles for future reading. I accumulated clippings from the articles with a lot of vocabulary and interesting grammatical structures in context to export into Anki. As I reviewed words in Anki and kept reading I would keep encountering many words I was studying which would make them stick.
The nonfiction and news reading and podcasts were exactly the perfect content for test prep (even though I was doing it for my own enjoyment). Some of my reading was quite dense but I found that I became more and more comfortable reading any and all content. Some sentences that I saved to SRS that seemed tricky to me became so much clearer and now I feel like there's nothing I would have trouble reading.
Another great side effect was I also started to think more critically and expanded my argumentative skills. Defending my ideas and points of view in class helped, as well as listening to podcasts and reading news that I disagreed with. I started becoming less and less tolerant of low-quality debate without nuance and I found myself relying increasingly on the higher-quality podcasts on France Culture and France Inter rather than the general audience ones. This is definitely a skill that transfers over to writing (if I would just it down and do it...) - especially on the higher level exams that ask for argumentative writing.
Writing For a while I had a great regular writing habit. The whole dialectic writing structure has been and still is a mystery to me. I practiced it casually by writing down some of La Rochefoucauld's Maximes in a small notebook as prompts which made it really easy to jot something down during 15 to 20 minute breaks. The Maximes are short, thought-provoking statements about human behavior that often contain an internal contradiction or something going against "common sense" that are perfect for exercising dialectical reasoning.
Vocabulary I found that the vocabulary study really made a big difference. When I was taking the top level group classes it was obvious that I had a much larger vocabulary than all the other students, even ones with a very high level (some active, a lot passive). A lot of the vocabulary being taught in the textbook and in class I already had in Anki.
Pronunciation For pronunciation I would start to read out loud (I could even do so quietly on public transportation without feeling weird when it was loud enough). I would also read my Anki clippings. The Anki clippings being shorter forced me to isolate certain sounds and combinations of sounds - I often felt disappointed in my pronunciation and discovered some really awkward sound combinations. But when I would transfer my pronunciation to reading aloud I found it made a BIG difference. I'm not sure how much of that has transferred over to my speaking but I really do feel like my accent has gotten better over the last couple of years.
Speaking I went through stages where I got a decent amount of speaking practice and other stages where I didn't (my second job now allows me quite a bit of practice). While not speaking, I did start using chat through HelloTalk which I found was a nice pace to allow for real-time practice with enough of a delay to allow me to call upon some more passive knowledge (try out some new vocabulary, fix my sentence structure from franglais to real French, fix errors, etc).
Results While I don't have metrics or data to back this up I can confidently say that all this combined has helped my French progress a lot in the almost 4 years since I left France when many people would have already said that my French was excellent. This is all a matter of putting in the hours and doing activities targeted at a high level that makes the difference between C1 and C2 and C2 and fully bilingual/almost native.
What's left Some things I would have liked to do with more time/discipline that could have made an even bigger difference:
Work with my Anki vocabulary: take lists from my collection and work on using it in writing and speaking activities to activate more of it.
More writing, of course: get into a habit of just writing for a certain amount of time every day or hit a certain word target (quantity without having to worry about quality). Take some selections and work on fine-tuning them with corrections from a native and working with a thesaurus.
Do more work with my reading/listening: do some sort of related assignment to engage with the text or audio.
With my current work schedule I don't know what I'll be able to accomplish in the future but at least I'm maintaining.
So my French playlist has grown to over 500 songs now and I feel like there's quite a lot of new stuff to highlight since I last did a music post. Plus I'm going to Montreal again! I'll be there during the FrancoFolies festival which is unveiling another big set of acts in the lineup tomorrow and this year I'm so much more educated on the current French music scene that I'm waiting in anticipation to see if my favorites will be there (though a lot of my favorites are still relatively obscure and probably won't be revealed until the outdoor free concert act unveiling in May).
First my favorite song off the first Feu! Chatterton album is finally freely available to listen to online from all over the world: Porte Z. It has a bit of a Climbing up the Walls by Radiohead feel at times.
The much-hyped band Grand Blanc finally released their first album as well. One theme I'm noticing in the French indie scene is a lot artists seem to be revisiting 80s influences that were around primarily in the English music scene back in the day (everything from some of the moodier pop, the New Romantic stuff, to the experimental electronic stuff). For some acts this is fairly subtle but recognizable (at least it is to me) but for Grand Blanc it's in your face like taking a DeLorean back to straight into a Patrick Nagel portrait. My favorite track on the album hasn't been released yet but is available to listen to: Disque Sombre and features some awesome bass. Their video Surprise Party really captures the Outrun feel - the revival of the dark synth 80s sound named after (I think) the OutRun album by Kavinsky, a French electronic musician.
Under the same indie label with Grand Blanc is Bagarre. They definitely very interesting (and catchy). I took notice of them with Mourir au club but I think Claque-le is the most fun:
A lighter, more pop/new wave 80s sound is Lescop a male solo singer:
Another band that just released their first full album is Radio Elvis and it turned out to be very good:
An artist with a really nice chill, glam sound (and kind of vulgar album cover) is Jimmy Hunt with Nos corps.
A really interesting electronic artist is Flavien Berger. He has music videos but I think it's just more interesting to watch him at work live:
If you want something throwback that's not 80s influenced or electronic, try some new psychedelic rock from:
La Femme (Sphynx)
or Moodoïd (Je suis la montagne)
And I better stop myself there. I haven't even gotten to all the new Quebec rock I recently found so I will save that for another post.
I didn't intend to be a French music hipster but by following some up and coming bands then clicking through related artists, and the Spotify Discovery playlist and checking out their opening acts I've become one by default. And now you all have French hipster cred as well!
I talked about how I read more news as a source for vocabulary. A while after first starting I noticed the importance of switching up the sources and types of stories I read. French politics can have plenty of drama but endless SRS clips from political articles get boring. I had one clip from an article about the Germanwings crash that I decided was just too disturbing to keep. With all the negativity in the world right now I also realized I don't want to see it endlessly repeated in an Anki deck so I've become more picky when choosing articles to mine vocabulary from.
Fortunately there is a wide variety of news sources available in French so I'm not limited to the depressing and boring stuff. A few years ago I was bemoaning that there weren't any websites in French with addicting, click-bait content. Well, there is now Buzzfeed in French. Just like the original Buzzfeed, there's a wide range of content from silly to semi-serious which is all very good for picking up vocabulary and cultural knowledge.
Some sites that have a good variety of all kinds of articles are Slate.fr and Telerama and Les Inrocks. And for some alternative news there's now a Vice France. For The Onion in French there's Le Gorafi and now a great satire of women's magazines, Madame Gorafi.
And recently I came across this article about controversy surrounding the web series Recettes Pompettes which demonstrates how these kind of articles can be great for learning all kinds of vocabulary linked to a theme or subject (in this case alcohol). Journalists often hate repeating the same terms so they'll use a wide range of vocabulary to talk about the same thing.
pompette, s'enivrer, bourré used in quotation marks indicating that it's a more familiar way of saying drunk, the term "binge drinking" used then explained in French with les bitures expresses [sic]) indicating that the English expression gets used in French, bitures, hygiénisme (movement promoting well-being, the term hygiène encompasses general health and well-being in French), avoir un verre dans le nez, alcoolique or the euphemism "avoir un problème d'alcool" (it's important to learn euphemisms), boire comme un trou, coma éthylique, défonce à l’alcool
It's been a really long time. I've been working two jobs which has taken up all my time for anything. I have no time nor mental energy for language learning these days but I use French constantly at work. Without some aspect of study it's hard for me to gauge if the daily language use is having a significant impact but I've heard good things about my writing (though writing business emails in French can feel pretty arduous and take me a while when there's a high expectation for quality/perfection).
I'm pretty mentally exhausted outside of my work time so I don't even use my commute time to read or listen to anything other than music. After I found myself spending my little free time before going to bed just watching old reruns on TV I found myself a new hobby that's mentally engaging yet doesn't require thinking (as in thinking thoughts that lead to stress type of thinking):
That's a bass guitar in case you're not sure.
I went on another trip to Montreal back in June. I saw quite a few people I saw last year (including my favorite French band ) and everyone seemed to remember me which is kind of crazy. I'm still working on trying to get there permanently. It's a complicated process but I'm planning a multi-pronged approach and not relying 100% on directly applying for permanent residency. There's a lot of demand because a lot of Europeans are coming out due to situations there and high unemployment. I heard several people say that the French in certain areas of Montreal is changing due to all the France-French speakers. It would have been nice if I could have gone back before the whole world wanted to move to Canada.
Came up with a plan for making progress in my project to move to Canada which I've outlined here in the Moving abroad thread. It involves making a pretty huge decision and big (temporary) move but I have nothing tying me down or preventing me from doing it at this point which could mean it's the time to make the leap.
Apologies for yet another long hiatus. I've made big changes in my life and my internet browsing habits have changed as well. When I was last on the forum I was hatching a scheme to take a huge step in my plans to immigrate. Well, since mid-September I've been here in Montreal!
Initially the plan was stay up to 90 days in order to earn points for residency and see if I could find a way to stick around. At the beginning I went to job fairs, looked at academic programs (mostly certificate programs at a Cégep), and just enjoyed life at a completely different pace. Right before leaving I also serendipitously found a job based in the US but able to be done remotely (which is legal under Canadian immigration/labor code as long as it doesn't compete with a Canadian laborer). With some money coming in I was able to commit to extending my stay to the full six months allowed as a tourist from the US.
Then, one random day in November, out of the blue I started getting a lot of inquiries from other Americans about moving to Canada (apparently the Canadian immigration website did as well). I was looking up the working holiday visa program for a friend who I thought might be eligible (you needed to be a full time student within the last semester or last year and under 30 years old). It was then that I discovered that the program requirements had changed very recently allowing anyone between the ages of 18 and 35 - at long last I was eligible to get a visa for Canada!
The US program isn't like the others in that it's not run directly through the US/Canadian governments but rather through recognized organizations that have the authority to run student and youth worker exchanges. The US program allows for visas of one year (from the day you cross the border with your entry letter which is good for a year up to when it's granted) and it's supposed to be renewable for one additional year. The main Canadian organization is called SWAP Canada and a few partners work with them on the US side. The organization I ended up choosing was FROSCH Student Travel for the ease of it's application and the lower application fee. I put my application in immediately, was "accepted" and prompted by my organization to begin my application on the Canadian immigration website where I uploaded all my documents, then right before Christmas I got my application approved and received my letter. I did my "trip around the flagpole" trip to the border a little while ago to activate my visa and I've been here ever since.
Once you have 12 months of employment with a Quebec employer in a skilled job you can directly put in an application for permanent residency so I am on the path to finally achieving my goal of immigrating.
I can say that my decision to drop everything and come out here was absolutely the best decision I've made in my life. My long term perspectives are so much better here and I feel so much healthier and happier. I made it through winter fine and now the leaves are coming back to the trees, the terraces are opening again, and summer festival season is going to start gearing up soon. Montreal is one of the few cities left of its caliber that still has affordable housing, is incredibly safe, and very cosmopolitan and the winter and the language requirements should probably help keep it that way.
If it weren't for French I would have never been able to do this (or even have discovered the possibility of Montreal to begin with).
I'm in between settling and discovery modes now. As I discover things about living here, especially after having lived in Paris, I'll have some observations I can make if that's wanted. Hopefully if all goes well I'll have plenty of time to discover all the complexities of being a French-speaking American in Montreal in French Canada with a detour in Paris. And if anyone has questions or requests I'll be happy to respond.
Languages: English (N). Read (only) French and Spanish. Studying Ancient Greek. Studying a bit of Latin. Once studied Old Norse. Dabbled in Catalan, Provençal and Italian.
sctroyenne wrote: As I discover things about living here, especially after having lived in Paris, I'll have some observations I can make if that's wanted. Hopefully if all goes well I'll have plenty of time to discover all the complexities of being a French-speaking American in Montreal in French Canada with a detour in Paris. And if anyone has questions or requests I'll be happy to respond.
Definitely keep us posted. My very brief visit to Montreal was a long time ago, but I still remember it as a beautiful and friendly city. I have no plans to move anywhere, BTW. Did you grow the beard before or after moving to Canada?
1 x
Many things which are false are transmitted from book to book, and gain credit in the world. -- attributed to Samuel Johnson
