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When I went to Montreal, I’m not exaggerating when I say that every single service worker I interacted with opened with “Bonjour, hello!” You would only have to fuck that up once if you didn’t realize what was happening there.
Je ne pas parle francaise.
Mon franchaise tres mal.
Par-lay-z vouze frankaise?
Non?
That’s okay, we forgive you.
Great fishing in Keebec.
I loves fishing in Kwee-bec!
I would ask if I could go to the bathroom because that’s all the French I remember from 7th grade.
My favorite phrase is one I made to remember the unrelated vocabulary words on a page: je suis une fermier de paumplemousse et j’aime faire de l’apinisme.
Why grapefruit, farmer, and mountain climbing were together is anyone’s guess.
Nice, that phrase will definitely save your life the day you get arrested for littering citrus sheddings but the world at large happens to be vitamin-C deficient after climate change and water levels rising have pushed what remains of humanity to the heights of major mountain ranges where citrus trees can’t naturally grow and they need a specialist with experience both in pamplemousse farming and alpinism so save our kind
I did say it was anyone’s guess and that one’s plausible enough!
Thank you, I do my best to output credible scenarios. Are you interested in a little correction of your phrase, or are its quirks part of the memory and the charm ?
I am always open to correction in order to better myself, merci et s’il vous plaît.
- un fermier is the masculine form, une fermière is the feminine form
- pamplemousse with no u in third position
- alpinisme with an l in second position as in alps
Merci, vous êtes une pêche.
Edit: yes it’s not a saying in french but I love swapping idioms back and forth between languages.
Always thought it’d be a fun multilingual pun to name a grocery store Fat Cherry.
I still can’t quite accept that the French for “what” is literally “what is it that”
But that sentence literally translates to “What is it that I can offer you?” That’s just normal English albeit a bit verbose.
There are shorter ways but that’s the more formal version, you can also use “que” pretty much any time you could use “qu’est-ce que”.
What is quoi. For “what is that?” we say “C’est quoi?”, which translates to “This is what?”.
Probablement qu’il parle de “Qu’est-ce que c’est que ça?” Ou “Quessé ça” en français amélioré
Le Jig est dessus. Mon français est parlant surtout. J’ai difficilement ecriter le Français parse que je apprendant actuellement. Alors, nous utilisons “Quesse ça” rarement en mon region. Desole mon ecrivant est merde.
That’s just WTF en francais, non?
Muchos merci, freund
I worked for a year in the entertainment department on Queen Mary 2. On one voyage there was one French family who were very pleasant. So I attempted to be a Good Employee greeted them at the door of the theatre one evening with a cheery “Bon soir!”, as per my GCSE French.
The following seconds were exceptionally awkward, as I had no idea what they replied with.
I learned a lesson that day.
Isn’t French in Quebec very different from everywhere else that speaks French?
Interestingly, Québécois French is less likely to use loanwords like “le weekend”, preferring instead to use terms like “fin de semaine” (literally “end of the week”). In terms of vocab used, a French person is still likely to understand a Québécois French speaker (and vice versa). I can’t speak for how much impact accent has on intelligibility though
Source: English person who did 8 years of French in high school, who also has a French Canadian friend
I lived with a French Canadian while living in France. They like to get so high and mighty about speaking “purer” French with “less loanwords”, but I would say they use just as many if not more.
One example was a day we started taking about cars. I hear him use words like “wheel” and “bumper” (literally just the English words with a French accent) and I’m like “bro do they really not use the French words for those in Canada?”
8 years of French in high school, huh?
I suppose it wasn’t all in high school. It was between the ages of 10 and 18, which would mean that it was from Year 5 to Year 13. In my country, secondary school is from year 7 to year 13; I said “in high school” because that’s when the majority of it took place
Some pronunciations are very different for sure. For example, France French says montagne (mountain) sort of like mohn-tahn-yeh, and in Montreal it’s mohn-taine.
Some words have a different meaning, they use a lot of English words, and have a unique accent. We Frenchmen can understand québécois with minimal difficulty.
Thank you. I have heard differently before, but never from a first hand source.
The easiest way to compare is Irish/Scottish relative to global English. Or better yet, a thick American southern accent compared to a British accent.
The idioms, the accent etc all have their particularity. Typically quebecers can understand French from France but the opposite is a little more difficult.
All that being said, just like all languages there’s localised variations around quebec. And a trained hear can usually tell the difference between someone from Gatineau, Montréal, quebec, Gaspésie or Lac St-Jean.
Try leading with “Hello-Bongjoor”, they’ll understand.
i’ve worked as a cashier in quebec, and i promise you if you don’t speak french, don’t pretend, you’ll only make things more awkward for everyone lol. personally, if someone speaks to me in french, even with a big accent, i reply in french, tho i know that not everyone does
ask if we speak english, more often than not (especially in montreal) the answer will be yes, and if not we’ll get someone who does. (at least that’s how it was where i worked, maybe other places who are less used to have english-speaking customers would react differently)
when you go in with the plan of saying “one coffee please” and you know how to say it and you think you know how to pay for it, and then you get a question you don’t understand after “hello”, that is something i can relate to
i guess it’s probably different in canada, where english is a majority language, so you can basically assume everyone speaks it, but when i was driving through germany, i first tried using my rusty german, and if/when i reached my limits, i asked if they spoke english and also it’s a challenge for oneself, i wouldn’t want to take that away from people, although i can see how it can be frustrating when a long queue halts for some time due to communication issues
I only know enough French to start bar fights in Montreal, which gets awkward because the folks involved are generally better at bar fights than I am.
Regardless, I’m convinced there is nothing in this world more satisfying than a hearty “TabarNAK” at just the right moment. Fuck’s a great word, but there’s just something about those extra two syllables and the emphasis at the end that fills me with joy.
I’m french and I fucking love the sacres. It is my personal opinion that my countrymen mock québécois and its accents because they’re jealous of the funny expressions and the way they can seamlessly slip some English words in any sentence with an impeccable accent.
I’m convinced there is nothing in this world more satisfying than a hearty “TabarNAK” at just the right moment
CaaAAAAaalice
Idk, I also really like when they chain them all together. Tabarnak de calice d’ostie de saint ciboire
<3
I personally rank it slightly below Tabarnak, but it’s still an S-tier cuss. It does have the hissing sound going for it if you emphasize the end, which I quite like.
Yeah. You can tell the people who don’t travel internationally that much always insist on trying to speak the local language as much as possible without understanding the high time cost of language switching in the middle of the interaction instead of establishing the language at the beginning.
I’m not familiar with the “jig is up” saying. Someone mind explaining it?
A “jig” is afast lively dance, usually somewhat comical in appearance.
Because jigs were often performed as comic interludes or sketches at the end of plays, the word “jig” started to mean a a piece of entertainment or a “performance.”
Eventually, slang-users in Elizabethan England started using “jig” to mean a clever trick or a “con.” If you were “playing a jig” on someone, you were fooling them.
“Up” means that the “time for the performance is up” or concluded. The most common way we use “up” to mean finished is in relation to time. When a clock runs out, the time is “up.”
Imagine a cup being filled with water. When it reaches the brim (the top), it is full; it can’t take anymore. In the same way, when a situation or a “jig” (a trick) reaches its limit of time or tolerance, it is “up” at the brim.
In English, we often add “up” to verbs to show that an action is finished 100%. This is known as a “completive particle” in the study of language.
It means something to the effect of “I’ve been caught in a lie and can’t keep up the act anymore”
The meaning behind the idiom is that “jig” is an old term for a trick, so you’re no longer fooling the person.
I thought it was “jig” like the dance, so the metaphorical dance is over
It actually does originate from that! But “jig” meaning “trick” is slang.
Seems it’s one of those definitions that only survives in a idiom:
The extended sense “piece of sport, trick” (1590s), survives mainly in the phrase the jig is up (attested by 1777 as the jig is over).
Huh, you’re right. I checked the OED online (it’s a subscription thing through my library, here’s the link the OED “cite” button gives, let’s see if it’s paywalled: Oxford English Dictionary, “jig (n.1), sense 5,” December 2025, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/1036112357.)
No dice, paywalled
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that’s a shame. I’ve edited the text into my comment above.
Cat’s out of the bag
Une baguette SVP
ahn kwassan!
written french is a lot easier to understand than spoken french, we need IRL real time subtitles for these people…
