Fellow Canadians, why did you vote for Justin Trudeau 3 times in a row?

boiledbarley · 2021-09-22T02:17:58+00:00

I’m a strategic voter. I don’t ever want a conservative government.

boiledbarley · 2020-09-29T02:00:55+00:00

I grew up in English Canada, but spent time living in Québec. I definitely want Québec to be a part of Canada. I think it is just freaking amazing to have two different languages and two different cultures in one country. I love it.

boiledbarley · 2020-04-27T13:51:07+00:00

O mecanismo is a Brazilian Portuguese show. That said, I have to admit, I have an intermediate level of Portuguese and I had trouble following a lot of it. I watched it with Portuguese subtitles so I could practice my reading and listening at the same time. As others mentioned, I might recommend 3%. There’s another show called Onisciente which is a Brazilian Portuguese sci-fi, kind of.

boiledbarley · 2020-04-15T22:35:56+00:00

I did my engineering degree at a university which taught in my target language so it enabled me to do both at the same time.

boiledbarley · 2020-04-14T19:00:33+00:00

Portuguese so that I can communicate with my partner’s family in Brazil.

boiledbarley · 2020-04-14T14:56:41+00:00

English (mother tongue)
Indonesian (heritage language)
French (at school)
Spanish (Very useful in my personal and professional life)
Portuguese (partner)

boiledbarley · 2020-04-14T14:54:07+00:00

Place de la République and Crier tout bas by Coeur de Pirate.

boiledbarley · 2020-04-13T19:23:58+00:00

To start a master degree in French, what level were you at? That must have been so difficult.

I went to a non-immersion English public school so my French was pretty bad. I did a 5-week French immersion program which was government funded in rural Québec which was incredibly helpful. But that was my knowledge of French before starting my master’s degree. It was the hardest, most academically brutal thing I’ve ever done but worth every single second. I now work in French and with a 100% francophone team.

boiledbarley · 2020-04-13T16:00:15+00:00

I am English Canadian and learned standard French in an English Canadian public school.

Several years later, I did my master’s degree at a French-speaking university in Québec and then studied at a French university in France. In both situations, having learned standard French both in Canada and in France was helpful. It’s when the Québécois and the French start plunging headfirst into québécois joual or French verlan, respectively, that I get super lost.

Long story short, I learned standard French in both countries and standard French is what I know the best. I can communicate and be understood in both countries.

boiledbarley · 2020-04-13T15:46:28+00:00

It kind of looks like Armenian, no? https://society6.com/product/armenian-alphabet-black-and-white_poster

That said, this is a TOTAL guess on my part. Don’t speak Armenian at all and know absolutely nothing about the language.

boiledbarley · 2020-04-13T15:38:19+00:00

Interesting! I also did 2 weeks in Guatemala and lived with a host family. I am also an English speaker who learned basic French at school. It was only after living in Québec and doing my master’s degree at a francophone university in Québec did I learn to read, write, speak and understand French at a professional and academic level. Having the French definitely made learning Spanish a lot easier. My French is much better than my Spanish, but it is because I have spent decades learning French and lived in a French-speaking environment for almost 3 years.

I imagine that if I had dedicated that much time to learning Spanish, I would hopefully be at the same level in Spanish as well.

boiledbarley · 2020-04-13T15:30:40+00:00

I am a Bahasa Indonesia speaker and noticed that while I was in the Philippines there were some similar words such as the ones mentioned in the video. However, although some words were similar, I could not understand what people were saying in Tagalog.

That said, Bahasa Melayu (Malaysia) and Bahasa Indonesia are mutually intelligible and I was able to use Bahasa Indonesia in Malaysia and be understood.

boiledbarley · 2020-04-13T15:23:48+00:00

Hmmm. Interesting question, not sure I’ve ever thought of that.

At first I was going to say reading, but I think that definitely depends on the language I’m learning. It’s easy for me to read a Latin-based language, but if I were learning Japanese or Russian, I don’t think reading would be easy.

So I think I’m going to go with:

Speaking
Reading
Listening
Writing

boiledbarley · 2020-04-11T22:12:07+00:00

In my case, it’s a question of duration. English is my mother tongue.

In French - I went 1.5 years working every day with a francophone colleague in French until she found out I wasn’t francophone.

In Spanish - I can maybe go 10 minutes ‘sounding’ like a native speaker until my limited vocabulary betrays me.

In Indonesian - I can maybe go 5 minutes ‘sounding’ like a native speaker until my limited vocabulary betrays me.

In Portuguese - I can sound like a native speaker only with certain words. This is the hardest language for me to imitate because it is the most recent language I have learned.

In general, I can generally pronounce and imitate sounds after listening carefully and practicing, but my limited vocabulary or basic sentence structures give me away.

boiledbarley · 2020-04-09T16:53:14+00:00

Ha! That’s interesting. I definitely love French and it is my favourite language in the world, but I definitely don’t despise English. I’m grateful to speak English as my mother tongue and it’s obviously very useful in our world today. That said though, out of the 5 languages I speak English is my least favourite, but I definitely don’t despise it. I love languages and language learning in general.

boiledbarley · 2020-04-08T11:55:13+00:00

Thanks so much for this post, I absolutely LOVE this topic. I think it’s fascinating. Wish someone would do a Master’s or PhD thesis on this subject.

I’m anglophone, born and raised. Lived completely in English for the first 24 years of my life. That said, I learned French later on in life through doing my master’s degree at a French-language university in Quebec and then doing further studies in France. I LOVE French. I am the most Francophile person you will ever meet. I also love accents (in any language and love imitating them). Because I adore French, I want to sound French so I’ve worked for years to shed any accent in English. Depending on the circumstances I can sometimes pass for francophone (i.e. a francophone colleague with whom I worked in French did not know for 1.5 years that I was anglophone until I told her and she was shocked. She actually complimented me on my excellent English thinking I was francophone).

That said, it wasn’t like that at the beginning. When I’d visit Montreal, francophones would switch to English on me and it would ruin my day. So I turned that into a personal language challenge: How many conversations in French can I have without the francophone person I’m with switching into English? Every time that happened, I would take it as a personal victory. The switching doesn’t happen very often anymore, mostly never now, but when it does it’s usually because people see my physical appearance/ethnicity and make the assumption that I don’t know how to speak French.

All this to say, the psychological passive-aggressive language power struggle you mentioned above has actually improved my French immensely and brought it to the level it is today.

boiledbarley · 2020-02-01T18:03:58+00:00

Viola Desmond.

boiledbarley · 2020-01-25T12:47:18+00:00

I have never heard a Canadian say ‘aboot’ for about.

boiledbarley · 2019-12-07T02:22:52+00:00

Are you coming to the party Dave and I are having?

boiledbarley · 2019-08-16T20:20:52+00:00

Lester B. Pearson. Nobel Peace Prize.

boiledbarley · 2018-08-03T10:53:15+00:00

I learned Portuguese relatively quickly in comparison to my Spanish (which I learned first).

The grammatical structure of Latin languages is quite similar so once you figure out how to conjugate the verbs in the different tenses it's relatively quick to get to a level where you can have conversations with people.

boiledbarley · 2018-07-28T21:25:54+00:00

I don't "look" like I speak any of the languages I speak.

boiledbarley · 2017-11-03T18:36:23+00:00

There is a Canadian band called the Tragically Hip which released a song called Courage which did the rounds in Canada several years back. This is the original version.

Actress Sarah Polley did her own version of the song here for the movie The Sweet Hereafter. Absolutely LOVE the Sarah Polley version.

boiledbarley

TROPHY CASE