Cultural exchanges

On Thursday I had an information session in London organised by the British Council for all the French teaching assistants of the region. I arrived about an hour late (stupid public transports) but it didn’t really matter, they hadn’t done anything important… I think they knew most people would be late—French people have quite a reputation here for being late (can be quite convenient :-p)
The day was interesting, with several guests who came to talk about bringing French culture in the classroom. They gave us ideas of activities (games such as ‘what’s in my bag?’ or ‘I went to the market and I bought…’) then some 2nd year assistants answered some questions. When the training ended I went to have a drink in the city with about 6 or 7 assistants, was funny to be only with French people! When my friend J from Québec joined us the others laughed quite a lot… Yeah, we’re really not used to that accent in France! Makes me think, I learnt quite a few expressions this weekend thanks to him!

Non-French speakers might want to speak this next paragraph because I’m going to quote a few typical québécois expressions that are different from standard French (and thus very funny and/or strange for me)
So for instance I learnt the verb ‘pogner’ (which comes from ‘poignée’ in French, meaning handful) that Québécois use to say ‘buy’, ‘catch’, as in ‘pogner des tickets’ or ‘pogner une fesse’^^ Then while my friend was helping me assemble my Ikea cupboard, he said it was no problem because he was a ‘bisouneur’, which in Québec is synonymous of ‘bricoleur’ ( someone who likes DIY, like repairing a light bulb, building furniture, fixing things in the house basically) This word sounds very funny to me because ‘bisou’ in French means ‘kiss’! Among other things I realized that my friend said ‘gnugnuche’ instead of ‘nunuche’ (a word to talk about someone who’s a little dumb or cheesy), that the Québécois don’t know the expression ‘tu me saôules’ (= you’re being annoying) but that they use ‘tu me gosses’ or ‘tu m’achales’ instead; or also that ‘a job’ was feminine in québécois whereas in French it’s masculine: they say ‘Je vais à la job’ to say ‘je vais au travail’! And the Québécois version of the series ‘The Office’ is called ‘La Job’, instead of ‘Le Bureau’ for the French version! My friend joked saying that this was probably due to a wave of feminism in Québec :-D

My Spanish housemate taught me a couple of things too: ‘Hola’ actually means wave! Makes sense, since you’re waving to say hello :-) We also talked about the smurfs (‘les Schtroumpfs’ in French) and I loved the Spanish word for them: ‘los pitufos’. Apparently you can use this word for kids or short people as well in Spain, how cute! My Italian housemate also told me that they often call her native region Calabria ‘Calafrica’ because it’s so down South^^ I also learnt German things but I need to check with my German housemate how to write them!
That was a short article about random fun facts about languages. For an account of what I was actually up to during my weekend, see next article :-p