Canadian French

Rebeccah and I are going to Montreal for Labor Day, just for a mini-break. Me being the dork that I am, I decided that I need to practice my Canadian French listening skills. I'm not so good with understanding that accent, which was made evident at Sophie's wedding, when I was talking to the Canadians there. So I was just um, pretending to understand, and then guessing on the parts I didn't get, which pretty much worked, until I confessed to Amelie, who is French, that I was having trouble. David, who is Canadian, overheard me, and told me that I need to tell him if I don't understand him. Which I realize is true, but in efforts to avoid this embarrassing situation again, I'm practicing.

I found these French lessons given by Radio Canada International online. They're way too easy for me, teaching words like hello and good bye and nose and car, but I figured at least I could practice listening to the accent with the dialogue. The first one cracked me up. It was supposed to teach you how to say hello, good bye, how are you, etc. So the dialogue is 2 friends meet in the street, they say hi, and then one of them says, "Oh! Good news! I'm pregnant!" like, really, how could you understand that if you only knew bonjour and au revoir?

My other complaint is that they don't teach you the gender of the words when they're going over them. This is really, really hard for English speakers. The more reinforcement I get with that the better. Plus, I think French speaking children must learn the word and the gender together, like it's one word.

I also ordered some Quebecois movies from Netflix. Hopefully, those will be more helpful to me, but I don't think I'm brave enough to watch them without subtitles yet.