Sen, if you had that experience at age 17, I think you may have encountered the first stirrings of a social-political movement called the Quiet Revolution that was all about Quebecois folks asserting themselves, their language and their culture against the remnants of colonialism, French and British alike. You also ran into our version of class-conscious reverse snobbery.

In 1969, I got a job in a charity shop sorting donations in a warehouse with a group of working-class Francophone women, none of whom had any schooling after their mid-teens. Their conversation was salty, rapid and conducted at top volume, and I learned a great deal from them -- much of it bad. To them, my Anglophone high-school French was a never-ending source of hilarity mixed with scorn.

Years later, I was in the armed forces and posted in Germany, at a little fighter base on the Rhine River. France was fifteen minutes away by car, and my friends and I frequently popped across the Rhine to shop and dine. My French was comparatively fluent, for an Anglophone with no specialized language training, so I did much of the talking. Every exchange began with the French person snickering and turning to a colleague to say the 1977 Alsatian equivalent of "Get a load a this!" I soon learned that my Ottawa Valley accent sounded to them much as the English of Gomer Pyle sounded to me.

I learned a lot of German, and by the time I left the service and returned to Canada I was fluent enough to understand the news on the radio, read the Badischer Tagblatt, and pay my electric bill at the village Rathaus without help. So it was a no-brainer to join a German choir when the opportunity presented itself. It was deja-vu all over again when my fellow choristers -- almost all immigrants from places like Berlin and Frankfurt -- heard my German, flavoured as it was by the country stylings of Baden-Wurttemberg. Along with learning to sing Bach cantatas, I got a crash course in Hochdeutsch pronunciation, kindly but unsparingly delivered by literally every native German speaker in the choir. I have never been so nagged in my life, even in recruit school.