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  #41  
Old Posted Oct 3, 2014, 8:08 PM
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Not yet, but give it time!
I think we're safe. He has claimed on more than one occasion that the Quebec section is the only Canadian section he does not visit. Ever. So rest easy...
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  #42  
Old Posted Oct 3, 2014, 8:22 PM
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I think we're safe. He has claimed on more than one occasion that the Quebec section is the only Canadian section he does not visit. Ever. So rest easy...
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  #43  
Old Posted Oct 5, 2014, 6:16 AM
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I moved from Vancouver (Ontario native) to Montréal about 13 months ago with very little French only a few months before had I been teaching my self a little bit through an iphone app and through my local Québecois friends.

I'm not going to say it has been easy and my French still is far from parfait but I can get by in my daily life now and have at least one friend who I spend more time speaking in French than in English with.

Jobs are scarce but if your desperate you can work for a company called Opinion Search calling people to do surveys its located downtown the pay is bad but its an easily obtainable job. There are "some" decent anglo only jobs but being unilingual in this city is kind of defeating the purpose of living here as you miss out on so many things the city offers.

DON'T live West of Parc unless you live in Verdun. It's easy to slip into the anglo-bubble move to the Eastern Plateau, Petite Laurier or the area around Parc La fontaine or if you want really cheap rents Hochelaga. (these are all inner city neighbourhoods) Where you will be forced to speak French especially in Hochelaga as its very working class.

But the best thing I did was go to an intensive French class when I first arrived it helped me meet a lot of new people as well who had recently moved to the city and were learning French. I went to Centre-Saint Louis in Le Plateau but there are many scattered across the city. The courses are essentially free (75$ for 4 months) and come in 16-20-30 hours a week.
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  #44  
Old Posted Oct 6, 2014, 6:03 AM
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Hey now I knew McGill was an English university, I was just clarifying that you could indeed finish a degree there without any French.
This is entirely possible if you only study and do not have to work. You will actually be stunned by the number of Anglophones who live in Montreal, especially in any part west of Saint Laurent. But it will be a great opportunity to become fluent in French. Take it and have fun... Montreal is one awesome city to experience for a few years... definitively the best in Canada.
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  #45  
Old Posted Oct 7, 2014, 6:07 PM
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I moved from Vancouver (Ontario native) to Montréal about 13 months ago with very little French only a few months before had I been teaching my self a little bit through an iphone app and through my local Québecois friends.

I'm not going to say it has been easy and my French still is far from parfait but I can get by in my daily life now and have at least one friend who I spend more time speaking in French than in English with.

Jobs are scarce but if your desperate you can work for a company called Opinion Search calling people to do surveys its located downtown the pay is bad but its an easily obtainable job. There are "some" decent anglo only jobs but being unilingual in this city is kind of defeating the purpose of living here as you miss out on so many things the city offers.

DON'T live West of Parc unless you live in Verdun. It's easy to slip into the anglo-bubble move to the Eastern Plateau, Petite Laurier or the area around Parc La fontaine or if you want really cheap rents Hochelaga. (these are all inner city neighbourhoods) Where you will be forced to speak French especially in Hochelaga as its very working class.

But the best thing I did was go to an intensive French class when I first arrived it helped me meet a lot of new people as well who had recently moved to the city and were learning French. I went to Centre-Saint Louis in Le Plateau but there are many scattered across the city. The courses are essentially free (75$ for 4 months) and come in 16-20-30 hours a week.
Woah dude, your "parcours" sounds so similar to mine it's actually scary.

I too ended up working for a bit at Opinion Search (lame!) until I found something much much better. I know a couple of buddies who went to Centre Saint Louis; I ended up going to Centre Lartigue originally and then I finished at Centre Pauline Julien in CDN.

Hochelaga is pretty cool. It's very working class and you'll see some quirky characters, but rents are super cheap (think 500 bucks for a one bedroom apartment) and you're close to downtown by metro. It will definitely force you to improve your French.
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  #46  
Old Posted Oct 24, 2015, 3:04 PM
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"Moving to Montreal Without French"
-- Don't.
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  #47  
Old Posted Oct 25, 2015, 3:46 PM
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I moved here from Halifax in 2005 on what was essentially a whim, because I wanted a change. I had no French to speak of. I worked for Synovate back then and that lasted till 2009. I do have a job now that doesn't require French...it's shit but it pays the bills and in between I managed to convince Emploi-Quebec to send me to French school for a year so I do have some basics though I struggle to have simple conversations in large part because most people here don't speak actual French, it's a mixture of French, local slang, rapid fire speech and anglicisms that can make it very difficult to understand many locals especially if you venture outside of MTL.
At school all the teachers flat out refused to impart anything about how the locals speak because if we weren't good in "francais standard" first, we'd be totally lost. However, since most understand English to some degree, especially in retail/hospitality, if you make a sincere effort to speak French and totally flub it, many will switch to English.

You will also come to realize pretty quickly just how many similarities there are between the two languages so that'll give you a good base on which to start. In your spare time, watch RDI news broadcasts and read papers like La Presse. I find It's sooooooooo much easier to understand French when reading then when hearing conversation.

I am lucky to have a Francophone bf and it's funny in resto's, some servers will hear my accent and switch to English even though I'm saying everything properly in French. Other times they'll hear hubby say something in English, I'll respond in French and they'll talk to me in French and him in English even though it's painfully obvious he's Quebecois. :-)

You can survive here without French but as others have noted, that limits you. When you get some basics (learn how to order meals, ask for/give directions etc) you'll have almost no issues taking advantage of all this wonderful city has to offer.
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  #48  
Old Posted Dec 19, 2015, 4:41 PM
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I'm always rather stunned by the number of Anglophones in Montreal, but I usually stay at hotels downtown when I do visit - Something I have regrettably not done in several years.

I am bilingual so getting around is not an issue in any area. Due to my Ontarian accent I will sometimes get responses in English. They can't seem to make up their minds whether I'm native English or French.

We Francophones really do like to hear Anglos learning to speak French, so don't be shy about it. It is NOT easy to make sense of genders, verbs, and French grammar on paper and I have huge respect for any anglophone that steps into that world and wants to learn and be part of it.

Like what everyone said, hang out and live among French people. If you end up taking only the academic route you will end up being frustrated by the amount of verbs and grammar they throw at you, without really learning how the locals speak. I find that is one of the main reasons Anglos will quit French in the first place. Too much theory and not enough practice makes for boring learning. Go the practice route, and worry about the 8 tenses we don't use at a later date
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  #49  
Old Posted Dec 27, 2015, 6:25 PM
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Immersion is truly the key. I was born and grew up in Montreal, but it was ironically not until I left Montreal to study in a mostly francophone program at university, surrounded by mostly francophone students that I was truly immersed in French for the first time in my life. And for the first time began to understand "joual" expressions and understand the punchline to jokes in québécois French. Having a francophone girlfriend certainly helped a lot as well (plus, she was local, so I spent a lot of time with her family too - made a big difference). So where was it that I exiled myself to, and finally immersed myself in a francophone milieu... UQAR-Rimouski? Nope. Université Laval in Quebec City? Nope.

The University of Ottawa. In Ottawa, Ontario.
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  #50  
Old Posted Dec 27, 2015, 6:32 PM
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...but it's curious, in 2015, that so many non-montrealers, from places as close as Ottawa, are surprised at how many anglophones live in Montreal, and how bilingual/bicultural Montreal truly is. Still quite amazing to what extent the Quebec media and govt (and to a large extent even national media) propagate the fiction that Montreal is a unilingual French city, and manage to hoodwink so many people in the ROQ and ROC into believing...

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I'm always rather stunned by the number of Anglophones in Montreal, but I usually stay at hotels downtown when I do visit - Something I have regrettably not done in several years.

I am bilingual so getting around is not an issue in any area. Due to my Ontarian accent I will sometimes get responses in English. They can't seem to make up their minds whether I'm native English or French.

We Francophones really do like to hear Anglos learning to speak French, so don't be shy about it. It is NOT easy to make sense of genders, verbs, and French grammar on paper and I have huge respect for any anglophone that steps into that world and wants to learn and be part of it.

Like what everyone said, hang out and live among French people. If you end up taking only the academic route you will end up being frustrated by the amount of verbs and grammar they throw at you, without really learning how the locals speak. I find that is one of the main reasons Anglos will quit French in the first place. Too much theory and not enough practice makes for boring learning. Go the practice route, and worry about the 8 tenses we don't use at a later date
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  #51  
Old Posted Dec 27, 2015, 8:16 PM
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...but it's curious, in 2015, that so many non-montrealers, from places as close as Ottawa, are surprised at how many anglophones live in Montreal, and how bilingual/bicultural Montreal truly is. Still quite amazing to what extent the Quebec media and govt (and to a large extent even national media) propagate the fiction that Montreal is a unilingual French city, and manage to hoodwink so many people in the ROQ and ROC into believing...

Well Montréal is pretty much a francophone city if you compare it to any other major city on the continent. That and only 739 000 of the 3 800 000 people in the Greater montreal area speak English as their first official language (about 20%).

Some parts of Montreal do stand out for their English speaking population like the west island and the McGill / Concordia ghettos.
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  #52  
Old Posted Dec 27, 2015, 10:25 PM
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I do remember when I visited and ran into a guy near the bus station who said 'finally someone who speaks English'. Combined with the guys confrontational tone and body language that set off the 'don't trust anything this guy says' alarm in my head considering every time I had any trouble with the French words for things folks switched to English.

I do think I'll need to brush up on my French a bit more before being totally ready to move in, but luckily I'm set up in Ottawa for college, so I can make frequent trips a Gatineau pour la pratique.
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  #53  
Old Posted Dec 28, 2015, 3:36 AM
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...but it's curious, in 2015, that so many non-montrealers, from places as close as Ottawa, are surprised at how many anglophones live in Montreal, and how bilingual/bicultural Montreal truly is. Still quite amazing to what extent the Quebec media and govt (and to a large extent even national media) propagate the fiction that Montreal is a unilingual French city, and manage to hoodwink so many people in the ROQ and ROC into believing...
Well, even though I am someone who values the historic anglo community's presence in Montreal, I have to say that my observation is that it's generally the opposite.

The ''anglo'' aspect of Montreal is often played up way above the share of the population, to the point where there is a persistent perception among many that it's a 50-50 francophone-anglophone city. Some people even seem to have a perception that it's a majority anglophone city that the evil (insert PQ, Frenchies, whatever here) have unjustly imposed French upon.

Anyway, if Montreal truly is bilingual and bicultural (another topic of debate) then that actually proves my point, when you consider that 15-25% (depending on city proper, island or metro) anglophones would therefore be enough to make Montreal it de facto (if not de jure) bilingual in most circumstances, whereas 15-35% (city proper vs. metro) francophones isn't enough to make Canada's capital feel very bilingual at all.
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  #54  
Old Posted Dec 28, 2015, 5:15 AM
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I do remember when I visited and ran into a guy near the bus station who said 'finally someone who speaks English'. Combined with the guys confrontational tone and body language that set off the 'don't trust anything this guy says' alarm in my head considering every time I had any trouble with the French words for things folks switched to English.

I do think I'll need to brush up on my French a bit more before being totally ready to move in, but luckily I'm set up in Ottawa for college, so I can make frequent trips a Gatineau pour la pratique.
Bonne chance!

Don't feel bad to force the francophones to talk to you in French! I promise you they WILL switch to English immediately otherwise.
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  #55  
Old Posted Dec 28, 2015, 3:32 PM
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Bonne chance!

Don't feel bad to force the francophones to talk to you in French! I promise you they WILL switch to English immediately otherwise.
This being said, I think it's a good advice to speak french in Quebec although most will be able to switch from french to english.

Same goes when you migrate in a country that does not talk your language to try to stick to your own. That is no nonsense.

You will be more appreciated if you at least try. We will all know by your accent that you are an anglophone and will respect your effort.
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  #56  
Old Posted Sep 20, 2019, 11:18 AM
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If one were to move to Montreal from Alberta without a conversational ability in French (but absolutely with the intention of learning!), how would one get along? What types of employment would be available, and how would one go about learning French in the quickest and best way possible?
Stay in Côte Saint-Luc and the West Island (Dollard-des-Ormeaux, Kirkland, Beaconsfield and etc.), basically western part of the city. The more east you go, the more French you would need to be able to speak.

French is a very difficult language to learn and speak. I strongly suggest you to start learning it as soon as you can, before you move to the city. Although you might be able to get by in those more anglophone-friendly areas, you would still need to know French to navigate many of the governmental websites, public school board, various organizations, private entities and etc.

Yes just like many of the posters said, Francophones WILL switch to English on you as soon as they realize you are Anglophone. They are not doing this out of rudeness or arrogance; they are simply trying to help you to make it easier for you. They just want to see you making an effort to try to speak French respecting the Quebec culture but at the same time they do want to make you feel comfortable too and not struggling all the time to just try to say something. Quebec people are very nice people, you will find. But if you really want to speak French to them to learn French better and faster, do continue to speak French to them even though they are speaking English to you. They will eventually switch back to French on you and that's how you learn otherwise you can be staying in Montreal for 10+ years and still can't speak a word of French because Montrealers' English is very good. You can hardly hear their French accent.

Last edited by HousesForMontreal; Sep 20, 2019 at 11:30 AM.
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