I was very lucky growing up, and my little middle school in my little village in Nova Scotia offered French Immersion (late, started grade 7).

Sure, some of my teachers were anglophone, but the rest were Acadian. When I went to university I didn’t think much about it, but soon discovered that I was functionally and operationally bilingual. I continued to study French at university where all of my teachers happend to be from la belle province and graduated.

Now I’m a professor in France. I’ve been doing this for about 17 years. My students greatly underestimate their level in English, yet here I am correcting 750-word essays written by 1st year students who have only “studied” English for an hour or two a week since middle school. Are they good? Meh… But they are better than they imagine.

Canada is supposed to be bilingual. I’ve seen different numbers fly around over the years regarding the percentage of bilingual Canadians. How about you, are you bilingual? How bilingual?

Addendum:

These maps are not directly related to the question, but I came across them while looking things up.

This is from 2016. I like showing this to my students. They always ask me why I bothered learning French.

And this is from 2021 and is a little bit related to my question, but only covers English and French.

source

  • DerisionConsulting@lemmy.caEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    That two charts have nothing to do with each other.

    The first is (English or French) + (any language that is not English or French).
    The second is English + French.

    As someone who did french immersion the whole way through, I can say it was honestly a waste of effort for me despite being completely fluent. Unless you live somewhere that French is used, it’s not really a common language. I mostly use it to laugh at poorly translated documents, or I can grab the French instructions of a new board game while someone else can read the English.
    If you want to learn another language in the same group as English, learn Spanish.
    If you just want to learn another language, look at where people in your area are from and learn one of those. Urdu, Tagalog, or Arabic might be a better choice.

    • bbbhltz@beehaw.orgOP
      3·
      1 year ago

      Yep, I know how charts maps work. I didn’t say they were related. I couldn’t find anything similar to the 2016 map so I threw in something related to the question I was asking. Thanks for pointing that out, I’ll add a little note to my post.

      It is great that you’re fluent. Barely anyone in my cohort/graduating class kept up their French, and the students that did core French might have known a decent collection of phrases and useful vocabulary.