ToutCanadien
ToutCanadien
Let's revisit the title, TOUTCANADIEN. You're here because you are interested in CANADIAN FRENCH. Those other web sites, they all teach Euro French. ToutCanadien is the only site in the world for a "one-stop-shopping" type of experience for learning Canadian French! And it's growing every week.
Ever look up a word like, "blueberry" on the English side of your standard French-English/English French dictionary? So, later you arrive in Canada/Quebec and for breakfast that first morning you order your pancakes with blueberries (and the waiter snickers and rolls his eyes). That's because "myrtille" is not used in Canada. The list goes on and on and… There are thousands of differences!
Look up the word "pop." You get "boisson gazeuse" (soft drink). Do you REALLY think mothers all over Quebec scold their kids by yelling:
"You're done! You've had enough soft drink for one day!"?!
Hardly! They're yelling:
"You're done! You've had enough pop for one day!" just like your mom would say.
The term "soft drink" has its place; it's what you'd expect to see on the menu of finer restaurant, but I can assure you that the local snack bar's menu is still going to use the word "liqueur" (pop) under the beverage section of its menu. Are you going to be like the typical American thinking to yourself, "Wow! This is great! In Quebec liquor is sold at snack bars !" or are you going to be "in the know," recognizing the word "liqueur" for what it really means?
If you happen to have a good bilingual dictionary that offers Canadianisms, you might happen across a Canadianism on the FRENCH side; that same Canadianism, however, is not necessarily found on the English side of the same dictionary. So better commit it to memory now, jot it down now, or it may end up lost between the pages for a long long time!
On a brisk winter day in Minneapolis, you overhear your immigrant friend from Paris say, "Je caille !" Hmmmm… context tells you that he's probably… cold ???? Later you look up the word "cailler." Its secondary meaning is "to freeze." So the following month while at the Carnival with friends in Quebec City, you utter, "Je caille !" The people around you smile politely (and are thinking to themselves, "That's the weirdest thing I've ever heard!").
Need more convincing, more examples? Click here.
You really can't be sure of anything in your standard French-English/English French dictionary unless you do the following:
Run everything past a native speaker of Canadian French.
Look everything up to check and confirm its very existence and/or usage in a unilingual Canadian French dictionary like the Dictionnaire Nord-Américain de la Langue Française (Bélisle, Beauchemin). Of course, you have to be able to already speak French to some degree to do this.
Look everything up on line using your search engine's "Advanced Search" options to target just Canadian sites in French.
"Well, why wouldn't I just look in an American English to Canadian French dictionary?" you ask yourself. There's no such thing on the planet; that's why.
It really sucks to have to RELEARN something. You don't have to go down that path. Ultimately, wouldn't it be nice if you could just go to one resource that you could trust?
…provides you with Canadian French and ONLY Canadian French (sometimes referred to as North-American French, sometimes referred to as Francanadien).
That's what differentiates this web site from the others.
