Grigory Lukin.com

It’s been over a week now, and anger has subsided. (See the earlier entry.) I’ll probably get even more perspective on this strange year-long adventure as more time passes, but I may as well jot down some notes here and now.

Quebec is a unique and interesting province, and it’s the only jurisdiction in North America where French is the official language. If you don’t live here (or in Canada), chances are you’ll never see any news reports about all the conflicts, reforms, and counter-reforms related to the French language, the pushback against Anglos (that’s the slang term for English speakers such as moi), and so much more. There’s a lot of rich history, and quite a lot of baggage, both historic and cultural.

You can learn the basics of the local francization program over here, but in a nutshell, the government offers free full-time French courses to all the newcomers, be they refugees, Anglo Canadians from other provinces, or immigrants. To sweeten the deal, they also pay $5 CAD ($3.66 USD as of this writing) per hour for attending those classes. That doesn’t sound like much until you remember it’s 40 hours a week, 10 weeks per course, and four courses altogether. With all the breaks and such, that comes out to exactly one year, and approximately $800 CAD ($586 USD) per month, which is pretty neat, actually.

The course was held at the cégep (a uniquely Quebecois type of community college) on the other side of town because, hey, that was the only opening when I finally got the call. Cégeps are used to educate teens right after high school, and train them either in hands-on skills (there were so many bright-eyed and bushy-tailed paramedic hopefuls!) or something more abstract, like philosophy. The entire francization wing was more or less isolated from the local students – in retrospect, kind of a shame.

The class itself was… slow. Very, very slow. To be fair, I’m not an average student: French was my sixth language (or an attempt at one, anyhow), after Russian, English, German, Spanish, and Japanese. Just about every other student in our class (the size varied between 15-19 students) was a refugee. Some from Latin America, most from Ukraine. (They didn’t hold the war against me after I made my feelings about Russia clear.) I had to constantly remind myself that they didn’t choose to be here: a couple of years ago, they probably wouldn’t have even imagined moving to the exotic French-speaking land just north of New York. Unlike me, they ended up here involuntarily, due to larger-than-life circumstances outside their control.

That is a very long and polite way of saying that there were multiple students who simply didn’t give a damn, or would do their best to disrupt the class, though sometimes accidentally. There was a young European guy with a raging case of… something, who delighted in yelling out his name and basking in the confused attention of the others. Every three minutes or so. There was a fellow American who had a bad case of ADHD and would constantly interrupt the class to say that “Ahh, and in the US, we do it like this” – stopping any and all progress for at least five minutes. (She’d do that about once an hour.) An elderly woman who loudly complained about each and every little thing, nonstop. A young Ukrainian guy who either deliberately trolled the professor or had a genuine learning disability, asking a question every 30 seconds on those rare occasions when we’d get an interesting presentation about local history.

And then there was the fact that one of our four professors was a power-tripping, emotionally unstable maniac. (Once again, see the earlier entry.) It had been 14 years since my university graduation, and the blatant power abuse (and a “shruggie emoji” reaction from the administration) strongly reminded me why I never continued my formal education.

All in all, the year-long course really helped my French – it was definitely more effective than Duolingo and other apps. But ye gods, it moved so slowly, and we received so little actual hands-on practice with oral comprehension… (Because you can’t exactly turn on the subtitles when the local talks to you and you don’t quite get what they mean.) I’m fairly sure I would’ve gotten the same amount of French (if not more) if I’d just taken a burger-flipping job at the local Tim Hortons for three months or so.

Toward the end of our fourth and final course, the cégep simply wanted to get rid of us as fast as possible. The final exam was a joke: not a carefully curated and strict affair like in the previous module, but a free-for-all where the professor looked the other way, and we were all encouraged to cheat and copy each other’s answers. Everyone passed, and I’m quite certain the low scores got fudged so that all 18 of us would get a passing grade and GTFO. Ho hum.

I’ve made a fair amount of progress, though quite a few others didn’t. A big part of that, I believe, was due to the fact that they never really tried to “francisize.” Each day, and constantly, there would be conversations in either Spanish or Ukrainian all around me, non-stop. That’s fine if there’s an emergency, but if you’re just blabbing on about the weather or what’s for lunch… Try saying it in French, eh? And then your friend will try to understand and reply back, and then before you know it, you’ll both get some much-needed practice! I was alone in my desire to speak exclusively in French, and that did not make me too popular. So it goes.

Some of the things I did while waiting for the particularly slow days of class to end:

• manually copied (yes, by hand) Wikipedia’s articles on electromagnetism and the underlying formulas thereof;
• wrote a short fantasy story;
• wrote poetry;
• read through my entire pocket English-French dictionary, found the shortest words, and wrote down my own mini-dictionary of said words in my notebook;
• developed a swing-trading strategy for my stocks;
• improved my doodling skills;
• wrote down the full text of a beautiful French poem, then its English translation, and tried to learn the fancy book French by staring intently at the two versions;
• devoured several science textbooks in an attempt to keep my brain sane;
• compiled several Kindle e-books on my phone;
• read multiple lists of quotes by my favourite writers and philosophers, then stashed the best of them into text files on my phone;

There was more, I’m sure, but these are the top ones. That should probably give you some idea how much free (or underutilized) time we all had. Ho hum.

Well… I’m glad this is over. No lifelong friendships had been made, though I did meet my amazing, wonderful, absolutely perfect partner back in March, and she (a native Quebecoise) helped keep me sane throughout all this. That alone means the year wasn’t a waste. We went on so many little adventures…

But I digress. Not every huge adventure ends up particularly fun or exciting, so this year-long project will almost certainly rank near the bottom of my eccentric ideas – but hey, at least now I speak passable French. Or try to, in any case. Salut!