As I said in my previous blog post, Learning French without “dropping the potato,” (opens in new tab) in 1975 I left my hometown of Belfast, the capital of Northern Ireland, to work in a small town in rural Ontario. I was so bored there that I moved to Montréal, where I have never been bored.
The choice of Montréal was no accident. It all started when I became friends with two Francophone colleagues from Quebec (the only ones in that small Ontario town). When they invited me to dinner at their place, I was surprised to hear French being spoken around the table. I was so intrigued by this parallel Canadian reality that I began visiting Montréal. I liked it so much I started searching for a job there, and found one.
Given the prevailing political context in Quebec, the summer of 1978 was definitely not the best time for a unilingual Anglophone immigrant like me to take on the role of department head in a tobacco factory on Ontario Street East. I jumped in with both feet, though, and fairly quickly learned enough French to do my work as a quality engineer and to integrate into Montréal life.
Thanks to my relative success with French, I was able to keep my job at the factory until the recession of 1992, when I found myself unemployed. I was then in my early forties, and sensed that getting back into the job market would be tough. With tobacco companies going downhill fast, my years of experience in that industry were no longer worth much.
So, at a time when unemployment in Quebec was close to 15%, I had to find not only a new job but a new career. Even engineers from Quebec were having trouble landing work. If I was going to have any luck in that tough job market, I would need to at least improve my written French so I could write cover letters and resumes. Up to that point, I had gotten by at the factory with just my oral French. When you’re working on the production floor, there’s just no time for writing anything down.
I decided that I would accomplish my goal by writing an article in French about quality management. I figured that my passion for quality would serve as a foundation for transforming oral French into written French. Despite the merits of this reasoning, however, I had a horrible time writing my article. I had no computer, much less word processing software or a spell checker, and it took me several weeks of sustained effort to produce 600 words. And it took all my courage to submit my article to a major French-language newspaper. Two days later, I almost fell off my chair when it appeared in the paper’s letters to the editor. That was the very first time I was ever published, and in French, no less. I was so proud of myself.
For months after that, I combed through job ads, wrote cover letters and occasionally met with employers, but the interviews never led to anything. After eight months of searching, I had almost given up hope when I came across a job offer for a “quality specialist” in the Saturday edition of my favourite newspaper. I submitted my cover letter with my resume, and this time, the first interview led to a second. That’s when I produced my portfolio with the article about quality I had written. My new boss told me that was what tipped the scale in my favour. Even today, I’m amazed that those 600 words succeeded in breathing new life into my floundering career.
Now that I’m retired, French remains my language of preference for movies, TV, radio and chats with neighbours. I read Francophone authors to improve my grammar, expand my vocabulary and of course, enrich my general knowledge. I recently went back to school as an undergrad at Concordia University. I quickly gravitated toward languages: German, Spanish and Irish, which up to that point I couldn’t speak a word of. My passion for languages makes me feel more fulfilled and more at home, and as a result, better integrated into my life in Montréal.
You see, learning to live, work and even love in French has forever changed my life for the better.
