From my understanding, citizens of Quebec have their own dialect of French. It’s not what American High Schools are teaching. They are very serious about preserving that culture too, or at least they used to be.
“It’s like those French have a different word for everything.”
I can speak and read French rather well, but understanding spoken French? Oublie ça !
French in Quebec went its own way 250 years ago, just as English did 225 years ago when we parted ways with the “mother country”. Parisian French is now noticeably different.