Mortifying Mistake

VIRGINIA FISHER YAFFE

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It was Montreal, the 1980s; I was teaching English at Concordia University and was acutely aware of my inability to converse in French as fluently as I desired. To fix this, I’d enrolled in an intensive two-month French-immersion course. Our class was a motley crew: grandmothers with time on their hands, professionals from everywhere but Quebec needing to pass French proficiency tests, teenagers fulfilling course requirements, and me, a starry-eyed and enthusiastic 29-year-old. I was determined to be bilingual.