One thought on “Cambridge Lib Dems…”

1. Congratulations! I might share this story with some of my students; a lot of them have a comparable level of English, and it’s nice to have some extra support for my mantra of “it’s not as inadequate as you think it is.”

   Speaking of Francophone bemusement in the face of dialect: a Belgian friend, getting married in Paris a few years ago, was told he would have to get his birth certificate officially translated “into French” because it gave his year of birth as “septante-sept”. To be fair, they did back down when he complained to management.

   The French seem uniquely narrow-minded about dialect variations in their own language; every French language teacher I’ve asked thinks of Parisian French as “la Francaise” and everything else as a sort of embarrassing pidgin. I wonder whether it’s an artifact of their education system that has been passed on to some other Francophone countries.

   You do make me miss Brussels a bit. 🙂

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