This ad comes from a website where job offers are posted: jobgo.ca.
I first came across this ad in the métro in Montréal (but I borrowed the image above from their website).
Magasiner : 6 heures
Gagner sa vie : 100 000 heures
AIME TA JOB.
Shopping: 6 hours
Earning a living: 100 000 hours
LOVE YOUR JOB.
There are two québécois usages in this ad.
Can you identify them?
1. The first québécois usage is magasiner. This verb means “to shop,” and it’s not used anywhere else in the French-speaking world. Similarly, the masculine noun magasinage means “shopping.” The people who do the shopping are called un magasineur or une magasineuse.
Spelling tip: These words derive from magasin, so they’re always spelled with an s (magasiner, magasinage, etc.) and never a z (magaziner, magazinage). They aren’t spelled with a z because they don’t derive from magazine.
magasiner en ligne
to shop online
faire un peu de magasinage
to take in a bit of shopping
magasiner un nouveau lit
to go shopping for a new bed
to shop around for a new bed
2. The second québécois usage is ta job. Elsewhere in the French-speaking world, job is masculine. Job is sometimes masculine in Québec too, particularly in writing. The feminine usage is much more of a spoken form. So, it’s kind of interesting to see the feminine form used in the ad above, rather than the masculine one.
Here’s an informal expression heard in Québec using la job:
Ça va faire la job!
That’ll do the job!
That’ll do the trick!
A related word is une jobine, which refers informally to smaller projects, temporary work, summer jobs, etc.
On the United Way Ottawa website, there’s a testimonial from a guy called Joshua about how the United Way helped him. He said: “(They) helped me find a job that wasn’t just a pay cheque: it’s a career.”
In the French translation of what Joshua said, we get a good sense of the difference between the words carrière and jobine: « Ils m’ont aidé à trouver une carrière, et pas juste une jobine avec un chèque de paie. »
Because job and jobine derive from the English “job,” they are pronounced with an English j sound, not a French one.
Thanks! I know it is not the same, but MAGASINER makes me “hear” in my head MC Solaar’s “Victime de la Mode”: “Elle emmagasine (accumule), des magazines.” At first I thought it meant shop for magazines. Et LA JOB, au premier abord, me sonne faux car j’entends “Je Cherche UN Job” de Michel Polnareff dans ma tête….
I wonder if I will ever be able to understand Quebecois French, really, since it has taken me 40+ years to understand French??? Still, it is fun trying in small doses through your blog.
If you can learn to understand what’s being said, you’re fine. You can decide later if you want to adopt the québécois usages yourself or stick with the ones you’ve already learned. You can use either in Québec and you’ll be understood.
I’m now officially confused. When I learnt “French” in high school, in the States (about 100 years ago), I was taught that “magasiner” was “proper”, or the French spoken in France. When I lived in Québec, I heard “faire du shopping” so I thought “shopping” was the Québécois. Did I miss something some-where?
Yeah, kinda.😉
You’ve got it backwards. Magasiner is the typical Québec French usage; faire du shopping is typically European French.
You may still hear faire du shopping in Québec on occasion, though. Sometimes European usages find their way into the French used in Québec.