Bonjour, Hi!

Hello everyone!

My last anecdote in my internship is more an experience that may be odd (I think it’s really interesting). It’s more something that I realized then anything else. It is when you enter in a shop usually we say; “bonjour” if the neighborhood is more francophone and ‘‘hello’’ if it’s an Anglophone one. But the experience I got from my summer part time job makes me say both “bonjour” and “hi” I think I do that because customers are both tourists and francophone. Also maybe the fact that I am trilingual influences the way that I communicate with other and it applies not only to me but everyone.  Most of the time when I enter a shop they will say just “bonjour” and if you speak English they will start to speak English but there is one shop, where I went, (Dollarama) in a mall where the cashiers say; “Bonjour” “Hello” and the most surprising “Holla”. When I first heard I did not pay attention to it but now that I am more aware of different cultures and languages in Montreal I think that depending on the language you speak it may change the way you say things like me who greet customers saying bonjour hi to give them the chance to communicate with the language they are more comfortable with. Finally I think that the more language you can speak with, the more you can communicate and share with others cultures and different culture with that you can say that it also gives you more opportunities in a lot of ways.  

How is learning English different in your internship than in a classroom?

I am able to acquire without the traditional  structured because I get to listen to real Anglophone and it help me learning in which sentence I can use or not a word (the patterns and structures) trough repetition and a casual environment. It is also more amusing learning “casually” then in the more formal way of a classroom. The strategies I use to learn is guessing which I think give more confidence when you already have a basic or common knowledge of the language you are trying to learn. I also ask to explain when I don’t know a word or I am not sure of its meaning. For now I didn’t face any challenges.