There's no Canada like French Canada, it's the best Canada of them all!

One of the requirements for my PhD is reading knowledge of at least one foreign language. Unfortunately, for my smattering of Italian to count I'd have to demonstrate it's relevance to my dissertation, which I can't. So I've decided to learn French, which is automatically approved. But the on campus courses that I could take over summer only teach reading. So I've enrolled in a language school in Montreal for three weeks of intensive French lessons. (Then back to Bloomington for the second half of those reading lessons.) I've booked my flight and just got my travel documents today.

I'll be boarding with a French-speaking family, which should be interesting seeing as I'm an absolute beginner. But I've bought a French dictionary and have started labelling things in my apartment, just to learn a few nouns before I start with the actual grammar. As of 2001, of 3,380,640 Montréalers, 1,283,145 spoke French only, only 254,765 spoke English only and 1,792,750 spoke both. Almost half of the French speakers don't speak English! But all the travel sites say that the shopkeepers all speak English so I'm not too worried. Still, having found myself a new confort-zone here in Bloomington it will come as a bit of a shock to be out of it once again.