[Verse 1] Grand piano in the background, let me set the scene — An anglophone therapist, Quebec, somewhere between the French they taught in school and what an elder actually says, Joual rolling off the tongue like it's been marching forty days. I got my Larousse French, my Montreal café French, but an eighty-year-old from Rimouski, man, that's a different stretch. I took the diagnostic first — ten minutes, simulated intake, recorded my own voice back and heard every hesitation shake. Read the CLSC report, parsed the clinical notes aloud, the gap between my French and theirs was written clear and loud. No shame in the assessment — that's the whole entire point, you can't locate the distance if you never name your starting point. [Chorus] Где я стою — where I stand, не на финише, на старте, с картой в руках. Я слышу акцент мой в чужих ушах — где я стою, где я стою. Mapping every fault line, mapping every crack, honest about the distance so I know the road back. Где я стою — where I stand. [Verse 2] Now here's the anglophone position — let me be precise, an English accent to an elder carries historical ice. Could be resentment, could be curiosity, could be a patient who's grateful, or a switch to English meant as kindness — but clinically that's fatal. They flip to English just to help you, trying to ease the strain, but now the session lives in their second language, not the one that holds their pain. Emotional memory is encoded in the mother tongue — the word for grief your grandmother used when you were young. If I accept the switch, I've taken something that's not mine to take, the right to service in their French — that right is not a handshake. So I hold the French, I hold the line, even when it costs me pride, refusal isn't arrogance — it's standing on the patient's side. [Chorus] Где я стою — where I stand, не на финише, на старте, с картой в руках. Я слышу акцент мой в чужих ушах — где я стою, где я стою. Mapping every fault line, mapping every crack, honest about the distance so I know the road back. Где я стою — where I stand. [Bridge] The reflective essay asked me: what do I assume? Where did those assumptions build themselves a room? School French was neutral, colonial, clean and flat — Quebec French was marked as deviation from that. That's the palimpsest I carry — layers written under layers, old maps drawn by people who were never the real surveyors. Hour four I name the gaps. Hour forty I close some. Hour ninety I re-record — and hear how far I've come.
← General objectives | Module 2 — Quebec French for the ear (10 h) →