I’m a native French speaker, specifically from the Acadian parts of the province of New-Brunswick (Canada). We have a lot of vocabulary, grammar and syntax that people who speak a more standard French might frown upon (lots of borrowing from English but also a lot of old French words which disappeared in Europe but not here, as well as some Indigenous influences). Fuck anyone who judges our dialect and accents, I love the way we speak.
That being said, there are a few things that bother me:
The pleonasm “plus pire” (most worst, or most most bad). There are a few common pleonasm but this one is the only one that truly irks me for some reason.
“Si que” (if that) because of something that was drilled into me by my dad, “les si n’aiment pas les que” (“the ifs don’t like the thats”). Using “si que” is like saying “if that I say this” rather than “if I say this”.
The more I think about it the more I guess my stance on this is that deviating from standard French is fine and even cool when it adds meaning or nuance. I just dislike it when it’s purely redundant.
I know you said you don’t want Linux suggestions, but I’ll be that person and suggest a Linux distro anyway, in case you ever change your mind.
Ubermix is a Ubuntu-based distro (meaning there’s a ton of documentation and support) built with education in mind. They also have a nifty feature to easily recover your system from boot if you do manage to bork the system.
If your goal is to help your nephew get good at computer, fixing various broken systems over the years taught me probably most of what I know about how computers work. I wasn’t much older than your nephew the first time I made the family PC unbootable (I was trying to “downgrade” our “Vista-capable” PC to Windows XP, apologies if this anecdote makes anyone feel old). It took me a couple of days to get it running again after searching through YouTube and forum posts, but that rushing sense of accomplishment when it finally booted up to the bucolic green hills of the Bliss wallpaper got me hooked on troubleshooting and tinkering with technology for life.
Either way, best of luck to you and your nephew, it’s really cool that he has someone supporting him in his interests! You’re good people.
I wonder if there are any studies about the relationship between emoji use and mental health. Because you just read me to filth via my emoji preferences.
I do also like the angel smiley, but I never really use it because I associate it very closely with this one ex 🙃
Where do you live? If I ever have kids I want to move there! This level of investment in education borders on fantasy from my local perspective. Our government can’t even be bothered to hire enough teachers to respect the maximum legal class size, let alone hiring a new teacher for a single student just to avoid having a parent teach their child.
You clearly didn’t go to school in a small town, lol. There’s at most one teacher per subject per grade. You can’t just not let the math teacher’s kids take math.
Ah Canada, where 50% of the population lives within the pretty narrow Québec City - Windsor Corridor and yet we don’t have any decent rail service, let alone anything high speed.
I live out in the Maritimes, so this isn’t even something I’d directly benifit from, but it’s one of the most frustrating policy failures in this country for me.
I get where you’re coming from, but without context your point comes across as more of a “all cars are dangerous therefore we shouldn’t bother regulating oversized SUVs” rather than the “Yes SUVs are particularly dangerous but let’s keep in mind that all cars are dangerous” that you were aiming for.
Lower-fronted cars may cause more severe lower body injuries, but likely cause less severe injuries overall because the point of impact isn’t the torso (which is where humans keep a lot of their important bits and bobs).
I am Canadian, and I may or may not have shoplifted, but I am completely unaware of this being in any way typical Canadian behaviour. I’d say a good 75% of people I talk to about shoplifting react somewhat negatively.
J’aimerais juste ajouter: c’est apprécié que tu penses à ces choses avant de déménager dans une région francophone. C’est très facile lorsqu’on parle anglais de simplement présumer que tous pourront nous comprendre, et apprendre le français ce n’est pas facile.
Bonne chance avec l’apprentissage et le déménagement!