Learning French - classes v. on my own

OK, whatever you say! I can understand Canadians talking French as easily as French / Belgiums / Swiss... the differences are less than 1%.

you may be able to understand them, but there are tonnes of differences. i know from experience

Bejabers! I've never been to a fully metricised English-speaking country before (Germany is fully metricised but not English-speaking). In the UK and the US, I've never seen "tonNEs of differences" or "metric tons of differences". Quite a novelty, indeed.

Many French people just don't understand people from Québec. But the accent from Montréal or Québec (city) is more understandable (for Frenchmen) than the accent from northern Québec.
Once, on TV, they even subtitled a man they had interviewed in Chicoutimi.

But even in France, we sometimes have a hard time understanding each other: some people in the North of France have a very thick accent. And some in the South too ;o) Not to mention people coming from Africa or Asia.

I think we can compare Canadian French and French French with American English and English English.
Some say Canadian French is French with a kind of American accent, are they wrong? I don't really know. But I guess there are differencies in some set phrases etc

Well, what we hear most, here in France, is that Canadian French is French with a "country bumpkin" accent. Which is quite insulting as well as false. In fact, the Canadian accent is quite close to the accent of Normandy, but a lot stronger.
The grammar is supposed to be equivalent but they seem less touchy over there. They often add prepositions or pronouns to sentences that wouldn't need them in "standard" French. And they don't use the same English words as the French people do.

A French who learns English will recognise the differences between American and British accents only if trained enough.
This is an adequate reason to assume that an English speaker wouldn't find too much differences between QF and PF accent.
What both the French and the Quebequois see as enormous differences is probably a slight, subtle shade to English speakers' ears.

Da Frogg
What happened to "Kabam" ?

=> Chantal
I have never had the pleasure to speak with Kabam. I just found his/her posts on another thread, but I dont know him/her.
Sorry.

"about the differences" I agree with you.

I used to use ... as my name but now that I see another person using ..., I'll change my identity to ::: .

An excellent start for French self-study are the Pimsleur tapes (all audio 90 lesson program). They are very expensive, but many public libraries and some college libraries carry them.
Good luck!