Sarah is another new addition to our hostel staff. In keeping with our hiring practices, Sarah (like our other new staff member, Robyn, is a fluent French speaker.
Unlike Robyn who developed her language skills from her Quebec roots and her mother’s French Canadian Heritage, Sarah’s French is largely a product of or educational system.
Sarah is one of the hard-to-find native born Torontonians (the demonym for a Toronto resident). She studied French from grade four to graduation in grade twelve.
She was not content with her “academic only” association with the French language and culture. She left for a year in France where she was hired as an Au Pair (child care worker) for the children of an Anglo-French couple living near Paris.
Her approach to honing her skills with a language was “total immersion”. When you are stuck in a small town on the outskirts of Paris, you have little choice other than speaking French if you want to communicate with the locals.
In some ways it is shameful that in a country that if officially bilingual, so few people outside of Quebec speak French. However, if our front desk is any indication, things are improving.
