French Classes to Immigrate to Canada?

Hi, I'm Chris and I run OuiCommunicate.

If you are considering learning French for immigration purposes in Canada, consider yourself lucky.

Even if you don't end up booking classes with us, you will walk away with valuable information.

Don't buy a cat in a bag!

So you need to learn French...

The Canadian government is putting more and more pressure on foreigners to know French for immigration purposes. Caught in a frenzy, there is a scramble to learn French and prepare for all manner of official exams and tests. For which you must pay quite a lot.

Let me tell you what’s going on in slow motion.

The first thing you might do is type “French classes” on Google and get certain well-known schools in your search results. They seem legitimate and project the impression that they’ve been there forever. Why doubt them?

When you sign up, you tell them your needs and they sign you up for a group class. By doing this, they can maximize the profits and make more money than if you booked solo with a tutor but they won’t tell you this. As a student, you will learn less well than if you were studying alone but it’s all good business because you might even fail the course and buy it twice.

Your school might sign you up for a “beginners” class and lock you into a level that is purely theoretical. They won’t let you go to the next level of French for simple reasons of economics: the more you fail your end of level test, the more you have to keep buying. The more you stress out at the thought of failing, the more you fail.

By projecting languages as a straircase with levels to reach, schools are able to split up their courses into different classes. They will make students believe that certain parts of French belong to a lower level while others belong to a much higher level.

In actual fact this is nothing but a point of view which can quickly be disproven. If we rather studied French with sounds as our guiding principle, we would shake up that classification entirely.

These large language schools that have authority to deliver DELF tests work hand-in-hand with the State. In a sense, it is a machine that feeds itself as a closed circuit. The State needs guidelines and clear boxes to know a person’s language ability and a school invents a system that can evaluate this.

You might be in a position of having to do a test for citizenship or university but this does not mean to say that you must take group classes or find yourself in a staircase logic towards French. You can learn 90% of what you would ever need for as little as 249 USD in our course.

Remember that all these schools are businesses whose interest is to sell. In a sense it is even better to have students fail a level test because they can sell you the same product twice. The more you fail, the more income it generates!

Let's talk about you as a learner

As a future student of languages, you must understand that you do not understand the industry nor even the act of learning a language. This gives you a disadvantage when signing up for French classes.

You will have memories of school and likely go towards the thing that seems most familiar to you: a classroom, desks, students and a teacher.

In reality, by doing so you have already skipped 2 important steps. You are already at step 3 without knowing it and it is almost too late.

Step 1 is the fact of understanding what we mean by “a language”. As curious as it sounds, a student who cannot answer this question will not be able to study one properly.

Step 2 is the fact of defining what it means to “learn” a language. What does it entail? What action should I perform?

When you sign up to a language school, you are implicitly entrusting the school to answer these questions for you. Or rather that they take care of it for you. But the fact is, you are now enrolled in classes without knowing what a language means nor what learning means.

Dedicating time to approach these two questions will allow you to claim French as your own and to become an independent learner. Instead of being in the back seat and believing the school will “place French in your head” you would be behind the steering wheel.

By going straight to Step 3, sitting in a classroom and believing French will happen you are taking a very slow route towards your destination. You might have placed yourself on a conveyor belt that does not have your best interest at heart and you are on your way to spending many times more than is necessary.