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Being corrected, and what to ask for
This lesson is doing two jobs. The grammar is the subjunctive of will and emotion. The content is the most practically valuable negotiation a learner can have, and almost nobody has it explicitly. Most people will not correct you. The reasons are decent — they do not want to interrupt, they can understand you fine, correcting an adult feels rude, and in many cultures it implies you are being treated as a child. The consequence is that fluent-but-wrong is a stable state that can last years. If you want correction you have to ask for it, and ask specifically, because 'corrige-moi' is too vague to act on. What works: ask for one thing at a time ('corrige-moi sur les subjonctifs, rien d'autre'), ask for it after rather than during ('dis-moi à la fin'), and ask for a reformulation rather than a rule — hearing 'ah, tu veux dire que tu es parti' teaches more than being told about auxiliaries. The distinction Marie-Ève insists on is the one to carry away. An **accent** is not an error. A **faute** is. Your pronunciation of 'r', the rhythm of your sentences, the fact that you sound foreign — these are not things to be corrected, because there is no correct accent, only accents that are more and less familiar to the listener. Agreement, gender, tense, mood and word order are errors, and those are worth hearing about. Conflating the two is how learners end up ashamed of the wrong things, and it is also how speakers of non-prestige varieties get told their language is broken. Which is Marie-Ève's real complaint, and it is worth stating plainly because this block keeps returning to it. The judgement she is tired of is not a judgement about grammar — Québécois grammar is French grammar — but about accent and vocabulary, presented as though it were about correctness. There is a real history here, including a period when Québécois children were taught that their parents' speech was a degraded French, and the resentment of that is live. Reasonable people in Québec disagree about how much of it survives, how much it matters now, and how much the counter-reaction overshot. This course does not adjudicate that. It points out only that a learner who has internalised 'Parisian equals correct' will be making a claim they did not intend every time they ask whether something is 'du vrai français'. The practical version, for your own speech: ask for corrections, thank people for them, and do not apologise for your accent. 'Désolé pour mon accent' invites a reassurance nobody wants to give twice. 'Reprends-moi si je dis une bêtise' invites something useful.