When I left off my last update, I fast-forwarded through seven years of non-use of my french at work. Non-use is a bit of an exaggeration, I use it occasionally, but I certainly don’t “work” in French. More like active listening in meetings. It’s even worse over the last 10 years as I’m working in planning. Almost all planning in government is done in English. I had a francophone director previously, and even he said he didn’t know any of the french terms for the various documents. Phrases like the Program Activity Architecture, now the Program Alignment Architecture, are shortened in speaking even in French to “le PAA” even though the french acronym is simply the inverse (AAP). But nobody says the words that spell out PAA or AAP, and even francophones pronounced the acronym as just the letters P-A-A (not pay-ah-ah). Sad, but true. None of the inputs I receive are written in french, none of the drafts coming from other branches are in french. Once they reach a certain degree of “finality”, they are all translated, but francophones face a daunting level of anglo-ization in the planning world.

I still suck at what I call short-term transactional french. Simple interactions, short bursts, with admin staff for example are really challenging for me…I’ve always struggled that my french improves after about 3-5 minutes, but if the interaction lasts only 1 or 2, how do you “improve”?… Read the rest