French man fails French test
An immigrant from France failed the immigration French test – “un examen qui est fait pour être raté” he says – but in his case it was the oral test he messed up.
I’d love to see journalists administer the whole test to a randomly chosen group of Quebec francophones. I’m willing to bet 35 to 40% would lose the right to live here, if they did.
Jack 11:32 on 2021-04-05 Permalink
This will be international news, pizzagate IX.
david77 12:16 on 2021-04-05 Permalink
This Frenchman would have been exempted from the exam had he graduated from high school back in his country. While a Frenchman failing a French exam is a little humorous, it’s not hard to imagine a high school dropout failing to get a B2 level (minimum professional competence) on the TEF. With that perspective, his whining is pretty entitled: the entire purpose of language exams for immigration purposes (Canada has too) are to ensure that we’re letting in the right sort – the type who speaks the language, but also the type who’d get to work and study for an exam.
This bonehead is possibly the only French in all of Quebec to fail this exam, because basically the only way to fail is by not having a French schooling background, AND then to actually be so bad at your native language that you can’t reach a score of minimum competence.
david77 12:47 on 2021-04-05 Permalink
Again, this is the sort of shocking entitlement that really only a French could pull off with this type of aplomb. You drop me in Russia oe even in France, you’re not going to see me complaining about the steps I have to take to immigrate, going to a newspaper to complain that it’s too hard.
Hopefully, instead of provoking a discussion about whether minimum competence in French should be a requirement to immigration, this episode will make the media rounds as a story about the peculiar centrality of complaining to the French national character.
jeather 13:35 on 2021-04-05 Permalink
Oh, I got pretty pissy when I was in the US and I had to fight to not have to take some test of my English skills. (They finally decided that even though they didn’t understand the high school details, the fact that I’d gone to McGill would be good enough, but it was a pain.)
Phil M 16:16 on 2021-04-05 Permalink
I graduated Emglish high school in Quebec with a certification of “Francais langue maternelle” and also did French courses at an English cegep, and I still had to take a French proficiency exam to go to a French university here, because bureaucracy.
Not sure if it was the same test as for immigration, but it probably was. And, honestly, the only reason I passed the oral exam was because I would look at the multiple choice options before hearing the question, giving me enough of a frame of reference for the question so that I could answer quickly enough before the next question was posed.
It’s not an easy test, by any means, and in my opinion it is designed to keep people out as much as possible, which is par for the course in la belle province…
CE 16:34 on 2021-04-05 Permalink
Have any of you ever done the English tests like IELTS or TOEFL? I used to teach them to students who were planning to take them for immigration or to get into universities. They are incredibly difficult! My classes were designed to learn tricks to pass the test, nothing related to grammar, pronunciation, spelling, etc.. Even though I knew the tests inside out and am a native English speaker, new example tests often tripped me up. These tests are difficult across the board, no matter the language.
ant6n 18:43 on 2021-04-05 Permalink
I had done TOEFL in order to be allowed to go to university in Montreal. I didn’t find it too difficult. I think when I signed up for the test they gave me a CD with some practice questions, and I spent an afternoon going through that. That was back in 2005 tho, and maybe I was lucky, maybe things changed. At the university, I often came across other foreign students (especially Asian ones), who seemed so incapable to communicate in English that I kept wondering how they passed the test.
CE 21:19 on 2021-04-05 Permalink
I’ve heard that there’s a lot of cheating. People will hire other people who speak English well as look like them to take the test. Or they simply bribe the person administering it (a friend of mine who marked tests and did the oral evaluations was offered bribes quite often).
Ephraim 21:44 on 2021-04-05 Permalink
I didn’t have an exemption and someone was going to make me take an English class. I looked at them and asked if that was a punishment for me, or the teacher that I will constantly correct. A friend helped “find” my exemption. 😀
Mitchell 06:41 on 2021-04-06 Permalink
I did have to take that test. And was definitely struck by the irony that it is (or was) a test designed by France to make sure the taker is qualified to “speak” French for the purposes of France. The questions (or whatever they are) are not always crystal clear (is a news story about an artists strike in Venice over foreign films international news or cultural news or . . .). And wrong answers are penalized, which is where I got screwed. Fortunately, I passed, but my score was lower than it could have been because of that damned penalization.
qatzelok 11:30 on 2021-04-06 Permalink
The French spoken in Québec has improved so much since the Révolution Tranquille that now, people from France are finding it hard to grunt out enough grammar to pass our tests.
TC 14:38 on 2021-04-06 Permalink
I passed the language test for Italian citizenship, which requires proficiency at a B-1 level. After the interview portion, one of the proctors told me that some of the answers were not clear to her or the other proctor, both of them native Italian speakers. I can see how this guy might fail depending on how things are worded and the test is designed.