Ahh, thanks for the commiseration! It really is tough. For me, I really do better with classroom learning than on-the-street learning, because I really do need to learn the grammar rules and such in order to know how to put a sentence together. I mean, when I first came here, it was to go to McGill, which is all English, my friends were mostly Americans, and I was a busy masters student with no time to take French on top of all of my program requirements. After I graduated, I moved back home (to Winnipeg), and by that point, sure I had learned lots of French words, but nothing about how to say anything. When I decided to move back to Montréal, I enrolled myself in three weeks' worth of an intensive in Québec City (I wanted full immersion, damn it! And you can't get that in Mtl!). Three weeks was all I could afford in terms of tuition (it was $250/week, plus I had to live!) and all the time I could miss from work, so yeah. I whizzed through their levels like crazy; I had a serious agenda to learn as much of the language as humanly possible in those three weeks, and I learned a ton. I'm now basically functional but I still have trouble understanding people, I have no ability to apply the subjunctive or a bunch of other things (I literally still need to look in a Bescherelle for a lot of conjugations, for instance), and yeah - I just need more time in a classroom. I don't even mind paying the $60, but damn it, I'm going to be evicted at this rate. I'm going to try again with Emploi-Québec, maybe at a different office...
Good luck to you, too! I hope you do manage to learn French sometime. It's a beautiful language and I love studying it. I'm about intermediate with German, too, which I studied for years and years, but ages ago. It adds depth and colours to your life and I like it. But damn it, they need to help non-franco Canadians!!!
Good luck to you, too! I hope you do manage to learn French sometime. It's a beautiful language and I love studying it. I'm about intermediate with German, too, which I studied for years and years, but ages ago. It adds depth and colours to your life and I like it. But damn it, they need to help non-franco Canadians!!!
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