Je parle francais comme une vache espagnole

 Asking if everyone in Canada speaks French is NOT a dumb question, but the answer is no. It's very region-specific. Some cursory Googling reveals that only 17.9% of Canadians are bilingual in English and French. Only 44.5% of Quebec residents are bilingual, which surprises me. 71.2% are first-language Francophones, so maybe a lot of them are not fully bilingual?

Apparently only 11.2% of Ontarians are French-English bilingual, which I also would have guessed to be higher. BC, Alberta and Saskatchewan are 7%, 7% and 5% respectively - I figured they'd be the lowest. The Yukon is 10.3% - would have guessed lower. Wait, Nunavut is 4.3%, so they're actually the lowest. 

The title of the post translates literally as "I speak French like a Spanish cow", which means "I speak French badly". I took French in school all the way through high school, but core French, not immersion like my own kids. I took a course or two in French at university and it was a frigging disaster - I did okay but it was constantly extremely stressful and humiliating. One of my professors called me and said "I don't think your French is good enough to take the course in French" and I said "probably not, but here we are". I was doing a masters in Comparative Literature, which meant you needed at least one extra language, preferably two. I sailed through beginner's German but I couldn't get past a certain level in French, partly because of lack of confidence. It was a massive relief to drop it finally.

We really wanted our kids to be in French immersion if possible just because younger minds are more receptive to a new language and why not be bilingual if you can? Fortunately they both took to it well, maybe partly because we just didn't mention that not everyone didn't do school half in French. It was halfway through grade one before Angus said "I think where Nathan goes to school they only speak English", in a "what's up with that" tone. Yeah, it was a gamble, but it mostly paid off.

Happily, my French was mostly good enough to be able to help the kids with their homework through elementary school. I did lose a lot of my vocabulary in the meantime - once I was volunteering and at one point Angus ran out of glue and I tried to tell him maybe he could borrow Emma's, and then I said to the teacher "did I just suggest that he could wear Emma's glue?" and she patted my shoulder comfortingly. Matt had a rougher time - he sometimes jotted notes to the teacher saying "this is pretty tough for an English-speaking dude!", and naturally the kids were merciless. He was trying to quiz Angus about body parts once; in French "les yeux" is the eyes. Trying to ask about one eye, he said "un yeu", which was a reasonable extrapolation, however ONE eye is actually 'un oeil', so he took some grief over that. For a dictation, he pronounced "quand" ('when') phonetically, like the beginning of 'quantifiable', when the 'qu' is actually pronounced like 'k'. That one haunted him for a while. 

Regarding the weekly dictations, sometimes it seemed like the English stream kids got words like cat, rat, sat, bat and fat, whereas our kids dictées had words like 'naufrage', 'pamplemousse' and 'caoutchouc'. It was rough. Sometimes the weekly reading books Angus would bring home were super hard. Once I said "could you pick something a little simpler next time? I can read French, but not, like Shakespeare in French." He whipped the book closed and looked at the cover and said "THIS is SHAKESPEARE?" He was better at French than metaphors.

One of Matt's funniest experiences with bilingual students was being in a sports store where the teenager at the counter was serving him in typical sullen, monotone teenager fashion. Then someone else came up and spoke in French, and the teenager switched to sullen, monotone service but now in French. 

I don't think either of my kids is likely to ever work in French, although I have no idea where Eve will eventually end up. They both dropped French immersion in grade ten because math in the higher grades was only in English, and some kids were seeing marks drop sharply going from French to English (according to my teacher friend), and both kids were math/science oriented, so we thought it would be wiser to go to English earlier. But I was shopping with Eve one day when she was about thirteen and she was talking about different words and expressions in French and English and then she said "It's so much fun being bilingual. I enjoy it very much" - and it just seemed like such a simple, lovely reason to learn another language.