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My background in French mainly comes from Duolingo, after having done enough to pass the Ontario grade 9 college level French course - of which I only ever really remembered the basics such as present tense, it’s truly remarkable that I made it so far with Duolingo alone.
In late 2024 I started poking around the internet for Ontario college certified French classes, I figured Seneca Polytechnic was the most practical option should any in-person components come up, which ultimately, never happened.
I registered for the placement test at the tail end of August 2025, with the scheduled conversation test (via phone call) a week later in early September. In comparison to now, the ad libbed phone call comes off as a total trainwreck, but I was surprised at how well I performed in the follow up written test, which ultimately placed me in the highest mandatory grammar course they offered.
To be honest, I didn’t expect to be placed high up in Level 5, bypassing a whopping 4 semesters/courses and tremendous cost, mostly since I was just fiddling around on Duolingo for many years, focusing mainly on written aspects as verbal features (voice recognition, “Chat with Lily”) were either unreliable or often intimidating for early learners.
I found Seneca’s level 5 course to be incredibly helpful in bridging gaps left by Duolingo, the grammar and structure taught by our instructor was clearer and stuck with me, in contrast to Duolingo often just throwing it at you with minimal or no explanation.
Of course, coming from a Duolingo background, the level 5 course was one of the first opportunities for me to actually start thinking in French, and use pre-existing vocabulary and grammar to structure my own questions, thoughts, and answers.
The course was largely supported by an online textbook which offered integrated evaluations with multiple choice and short answer questions - these were used for both homework and grade evaluation purposes. Additional learning material came from online sources and class activities, and additional evaluations took the form of reading/writing, conversational, and listening tests.
The biggest assignment perhaps was the cultural assignment, in which students had to choose a Francophone country and present a brief profile on it. This assignment was a bit of a shake up in comparison to all other academic assignments I previously completed, largely attributed to the language difference, but also because of the on-the-spot post-presentation Q and A session.
That presentation of course, is available here.
To round out this section on the level 5 course, an interesting thing that happened was that I got corrected for dropping the “ne” in casual speech, which makes sense in an instructional setting - this rule was (implicitly) more relaxed in the following conversation based course, LGE611.
The final installment of mandatory courses (for the program certificate) was a conversation based course, focused on application of previous skill and knowledge, less so on content learning and corrections.
It’s worth noting that I joined two informal conversation groups around this time - one that started before this course, and one that started after. Though this course has since ended, I continue to participate in the two informal conversation groups, with an in-person meetup planned for the summer.
Most classes consisted of students separating into breakout rooms to discuss topics before regrouping to discuss among the class. Evaluations consisted of participation, live conversation tests, listening tests (multiple choice and short answer), and a cultural presentation assignment.
Though not required for the assignment, I wanted my LGE611 presentation to be an iterative evolution of my LGE505 presentation. As such, it involved more information sources, self produced photos, updated presentation graphics with tweaked kerning for improved legibility, and is delivered as an audio integrated PowerPoint, video, and webpage.
That presentation can be found here.
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