I have been flying in Quebec for many years. I am fluent in French and English so I have no situational awareness issues. In controlled airspace there won't be any problems. You may encounter issues with unilingual French pilots at smaller uncontrolled fields in the hinterlands, but you'll find that if you come on the frequency in English, most French pilots will understand that you probably can't speak French, and will attempt to communicate their position/intentions in English, as broken as it may be some times.
It would help to learn a few situational terms so you can at least decipher a French position report around an airfield and keep out of each other's way:
"Vent arrière" means on the downwind leg (add "droite" and it means a right downwind); "long-vent arrière" means "extended downwind", and "mi-vent arrière" is "mid-downwind"
"Base" (prounounced baze in French) means as you guessed, base leg
"approche finale" I think is pretty easy to sort out; prefix that with "courte" and it means "short final", "longue" means of course long.
"À la verticale des installations" means directly overhead the field;
"En vent traversier" means the crosswind leg (when flying bump-and-goes).
A bit of number recognition helps; we use "milles" or "milles nautiques" in French which means "miles" or "nautical miles" (to be proper French it we should really say "milles marins"; Quebecers are a great bunch of people but we can and do murder the language considerably), so if you can say up to 10 in French, you can understand a position report of someone who is "5 milles en rapprochement" which means 5 miles inbound, and maybe thousands, so you can interpret altitudes.
Oh and Est is East, Ouest is West, Nord is North, and Sud is South.
I'm willing to bet if you live here long enough, you'll pick up the essentials pretty quick. And may I emphatically recommend a French girlfriend while you are here; not only will you learn the nuts and bolts of the language that much faster, it will be that much more fun because they are the best-looking and most warm-blooded women in Canada!
One last bit of advice, and this goes for any VFR flyer (which a student will be), keep yer head out of the cockpit.