An attempt at a proper post
Feb. 9th, 2014 02:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mousmeA long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, i.e. before work went nuts on me, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
tx_cronopio asked me about the French language.
Are you fully bilingual, or is French something you have to work at?
The short answer to your questions is yes, and yes.
Here is the longer version. Be warned, there is a fair bit of patting myself on the back in here. So, you know, if you don't want to read my self-congratulatory crap, you can give this whole post a miss. :)
French is my native language. I spoke French first, and learned English subsequently, though not all that long after. I was raised by a francophone father and an anglophone mother (technically she'd be considered an "allophone" in Quebec, since English isn't her first language either). Both my parents are fluent in French and English, and both of them speak at least two other languages with varying degrees of fluency. My father speaks almost impeccable Spanish, for instance. There's a recording of me singing "London Bridge Is Falling Down" when I was about two years old, and I have the thickest French accent ever.
For the first twenty years of my life, I grew up and lived in a primarily English-speaking neighbourhood. My French-Canadian father was something of a novelty for all our neighbours, who used to find it fun to "practice" their French with him. "Oh, bohn-djuur, Dorval!" was as far as they usually got. It was hilarious, at least to me.
Enter the Infamous Quebec Language Laws (aka Law 101). When I was young, my mother wanted to send me to English private school in my city. According to the law, because both my parents weren't educated in Quebec and in English, there was only a limited number of years in which I was allowed to be schooled in English. The rest of my schooling had to be in French. My parents opted to send me to elementary school in English.
A quick aside, for my American friends. In Quebec, elementary school only goes up to grade 6, and grade 7 is considered high school. That meant that I would have to switch to French in high school.
Okay, so, fast-forward to when I was 11 years old, my French was okay but mostly oral. I excelled at the French classes in school, but they were pretty basic beginner stuff, and nowhere near enough to get me into a good school. I don't know if it's still the case now, but at the time there were exams to get into private high schools, and if I wanted any chance of admission, then I needed to up my game. So my mother got my next door neighbour N to tutor me. My mother is N's godmother, and N's mother is my godmother, and I was best friends with N's younger sister B growing up. N and B both went to the same kind of school I wanted to go to, so N was a logical choice since she knew what I should focus on in terms of extra studying.
She and I spent an enjoyable few months working on bringing my French to the next level. Yes, I am one of those weirdos who really enjoyed schoolwork, especially when I was a kid. Also, N was a really fun and engaging tutor. She knew my interests, had babysat me most of my life, and knew exactly how to keep me enthusiastic about the less interesting aspects of it all. She also tutored me in maths, because maths actually work differently in French (not the numbers themselves, but how numbers are expressed and how equations are solved). Long division ended up making a lot more sense to me in French than they had in English, which was a relief. I hated long division at the time.
I ended up scoring near-perfect marks on my entrance exams, and went to my school of choice. It also happened to be my father's alma mater, which was one of the reasons I wanted to go there in the first place, language laws notwithstanding. I spent the next seven years there, going through both high school and lycée, and culminating in a French baccalaureate. Throughout this time I continued to excel in French, and never looked back. I also read voraciously, in both English and French. Just before I graduated I took part in the Concours Général de France, which required me to write six essays on various texts and translate another text from English to French over the course of five hours. It was one of the most gruelling exams I've ever had to sit through, including anything I had to do during my university undergrad, but it paid off, because I won first place. Seventeen years later, I'm still very proud of that accomplishment. :)
After that, I went to McGill university to study English literature, and when I left I ended up in a customer service job at Bell Mobility, for which I was required to be bilingual, though not necessarily 100% fluent in either official language. I just had to make myself understood.
The only job I've ever had that required me to be 100% bilingual was the year I spent doing freelance translation, back in 2003-2004. I was miserable that year, partly because I was still working through some serious and rather debilitating mental health issues. I was isolated and having some pretty spectacular mood swings, and working on my own was only a little short of a disaster. At the time, I figured that the utter loathing I felt for translation work was due to that, and the fact that I dislike working entirely on my own.
As it turns out, I was wrong. This past year I picked up two translation contracts in an attempt to remedy the "too much month at the end of the money" problem my household seems to be facing on a regular basis. As it happens I still loathe translation work. I struggled so hard with the contracts that I was eventually obliged to cancel the second one entirely. The money I was being paid just wasn't worth the time and effort I was putting into the work. The second contract also coincided, timing-wise, with the beginning of my new job, the new commute, and everything that went with that, and I came very close to having a nervous breakdown over it.
It doesn't help, either, that translation work brings out my impostor syndrome like nothing else. See, I am not officially a translator. I don't have a nifty piece of paper that I can whip out to prove to people that I studied hard and got a degree and so I am totally legit and everything, okay? Yeah. My brain is weird, what can I say? So having translation work ratchets up my anxiety levels to a point where I don't know what to do with myself anymore, and then I procrastinate, and then I feel horrible, and the quality of my work suffers for it.
So, yes. French is something I have to work at, especially if I'm translating. It's a tricky language even for native speakers, full of rules and exceptions and a million things that don't really make sense. I do love the language, though. It has its own special beauty, the way all languages do, and there are days when I love nothing more than to find my old poetry books and go wallow in the rhyme and meter for a while, just to remind myself of all the reasons I have to adore everything about the language. There are days when it, and nothing else, is like a balm to my soul.
tx_cronopio asked me about the French language.Are you fully bilingual, or is French something you have to work at?
The short answer to your questions is yes, and yes.
Here is the longer version. Be warned, there is a fair bit of patting myself on the back in here. So, you know, if you don't want to read my self-congratulatory crap, you can give this whole post a miss. :)
French is my native language. I spoke French first, and learned English subsequently, though not all that long after. I was raised by a francophone father and an anglophone mother (technically she'd be considered an "allophone" in Quebec, since English isn't her first language either). Both my parents are fluent in French and English, and both of them speak at least two other languages with varying degrees of fluency. My father speaks almost impeccable Spanish, for instance. There's a recording of me singing "London Bridge Is Falling Down" when I was about two years old, and I have the thickest French accent ever.
For the first twenty years of my life, I grew up and lived in a primarily English-speaking neighbourhood. My French-Canadian father was something of a novelty for all our neighbours, who used to find it fun to "practice" their French with him. "Oh, bohn-djuur, Dorval!" was as far as they usually got. It was hilarious, at least to me.
Enter the Infamous Quebec Language Laws (aka Law 101). When I was young, my mother wanted to send me to English private school in my city. According to the law, because both my parents weren't educated in Quebec and in English, there was only a limited number of years in which I was allowed to be schooled in English. The rest of my schooling had to be in French. My parents opted to send me to elementary school in English.
A quick aside, for my American friends. In Quebec, elementary school only goes up to grade 6, and grade 7 is considered high school. That meant that I would have to switch to French in high school.
Okay, so, fast-forward to when I was 11 years old, my French was okay but mostly oral. I excelled at the French classes in school, but they were pretty basic beginner stuff, and nowhere near enough to get me into a good school. I don't know if it's still the case now, but at the time there were exams to get into private high schools, and if I wanted any chance of admission, then I needed to up my game. So my mother got my next door neighbour N to tutor me. My mother is N's godmother, and N's mother is my godmother, and I was best friends with N's younger sister B growing up. N and B both went to the same kind of school I wanted to go to, so N was a logical choice since she knew what I should focus on in terms of extra studying.
She and I spent an enjoyable few months working on bringing my French to the next level. Yes, I am one of those weirdos who really enjoyed schoolwork, especially when I was a kid. Also, N was a really fun and engaging tutor. She knew my interests, had babysat me most of my life, and knew exactly how to keep me enthusiastic about the less interesting aspects of it all. She also tutored me in maths, because maths actually work differently in French (not the numbers themselves, but how numbers are expressed and how equations are solved). Long division ended up making a lot more sense to me in French than they had in English, which was a relief. I hated long division at the time.
I ended up scoring near-perfect marks on my entrance exams, and went to my school of choice. It also happened to be my father's alma mater, which was one of the reasons I wanted to go there in the first place, language laws notwithstanding. I spent the next seven years there, going through both high school and lycée, and culminating in a French baccalaureate. Throughout this time I continued to excel in French, and never looked back. I also read voraciously, in both English and French. Just before I graduated I took part in the Concours Général de France, which required me to write six essays on various texts and translate another text from English to French over the course of five hours. It was one of the most gruelling exams I've ever had to sit through, including anything I had to do during my university undergrad, but it paid off, because I won first place. Seventeen years later, I'm still very proud of that accomplishment. :)
After that, I went to McGill university to study English literature, and when I left I ended up in a customer service job at Bell Mobility, for which I was required to be bilingual, though not necessarily 100% fluent in either official language. I just had to make myself understood.
The only job I've ever had that required me to be 100% bilingual was the year I spent doing freelance translation, back in 2003-2004. I was miserable that year, partly because I was still working through some serious and rather debilitating mental health issues. I was isolated and having some pretty spectacular mood swings, and working on my own was only a little short of a disaster. At the time, I figured that the utter loathing I felt for translation work was due to that, and the fact that I dislike working entirely on my own.
As it turns out, I was wrong. This past year I picked up two translation contracts in an attempt to remedy the "too much month at the end of the money" problem my household seems to be facing on a regular basis. As it happens I still loathe translation work. I struggled so hard with the contracts that I was eventually obliged to cancel the second one entirely. The money I was being paid just wasn't worth the time and effort I was putting into the work. The second contract also coincided, timing-wise, with the beginning of my new job, the new commute, and everything that went with that, and I came very close to having a nervous breakdown over it.
It doesn't help, either, that translation work brings out my impostor syndrome like nothing else. See, I am not officially a translator. I don't have a nifty piece of paper that I can whip out to prove to people that I studied hard and got a degree and so I am totally legit and everything, okay? Yeah. My brain is weird, what can I say? So having translation work ratchets up my anxiety levels to a point where I don't know what to do with myself anymore, and then I procrastinate, and then I feel horrible, and the quality of my work suffers for it.
So, yes. French is something I have to work at, especially if I'm translating. It's a tricky language even for native speakers, full of rules and exceptions and a million things that don't really make sense. I do love the language, though. It has its own special beauty, the way all languages do, and there are days when I love nothing more than to find my old poetry books and go wallow in the rhyme and meter for a while, just to remind myself of all the reasons I have to adore everything about the language. There are days when it, and nothing else, is like a balm to my soul.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2014-02-09 05:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-02-09 05:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-02-10 10:18 pm (UTC)You mean that if you had the piece of paper, you'd somehow manage to avoid the impostor syndrome? That is weird. Impostor syndrome is usually more stubborn than that (I say, while still suspecting that my thesis advisor helped me out too much, and I didn't really earn my Ph.D.)
no subject
Date: 2014-02-12 01:59 am (UTC)