The thing to remember is that in Montreal, roughly 1/2 the population are native English speakers, and most of the other half has serious ESL skills. When I liv

The thing to remember is that in Montreal, roughly 1/2 the population are native English speakers, and most of the other half has serious ESL skills. When I lived there, it basically a faux pas to mangle your french, since the person you were speaking to inevitably spoke English vastly better than you/I spoke french. French classes (there) inevitably teach you phrases to use to try and stop people from "helpfully" switching back to English. OTOH, if you wandered out to Shawinigan or Trois-Rivières, or even just Laval/Anjou you'd find a lot more uni-lingual Quebecois speakers, who would be positively delighted to hear your(/my) mangled grammar and grotesque pronunciations.