Foreign Perspectives

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Whilst the principle of going on holiday over Christmas sounds nice, the reality is often different.

You’ve to content with the traffic jams on the roads in and out of towns for a start which can easily add hours to your travel time before you even get onto the open road.

Then there’s the business of booking travel components.  Whilst there are a lot of people going on holiday around this time, there aren’t nearly the numbers that you get in the summer peaks. However, the winding down of everyone towards their Christmas break means that if there are problems then they aren’t always fixable. For example, you’ll frequently find a discrepancy between the availability as displayed online, in ticket booths and in automated ticket sales machines. Just today the message was “no seats available” in two out of three outlets.

And, of course, there’s the business of closures over the Christmas period. If you’re going to somewhere that you’ve not been to before over this period it’s often far from clear what’ll be open and what’ll be closed.

Don’t let all these complications put you off a Christmas break though. Just make sure that you do your research in advance so you aren’t surprised when something essential for you isn’t operating over Christmas.

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Whilst I was doing the Spanish course, the big dictionary was the way to go. On degree level courses small dictionaries just don’t cut it and neither do electronic ones, most of which have a considerably fewer number of words than even the smallest of the paper dictionaries.

However, when you’re settling down to read a novel in a foreign language the only way to go is with one of the pen scanners. Large dictionaries aren’t really a runner unless you always read in the one spot as you’re never going to carry around any kind of sizeable dictionary, are you?

Normal electronic dictionaries are a bit of a pain when you’re reading too in that they’re pretty slow, particularly if you’ve to look up a couple of words in a sentence.

With the pen dictionaries all those problems disappear at a stroke. They look up a whole line of words for you in one go for a start and they’re a similar size to the smaller paper dictionaries. The only downside is that they’re a good deal more expensive than normal electronic dictionaries and indeed more expensive than even the largest paper ones.

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It’s been six years since I started off on what subsequently became a modern languages degree and from the original 25 of us there are only two left in the “race” at this point.

It’s not so much that people have failed but rather that they’ve reached the point where they have achieved their intended objectives and therefore dropped out of the running towards the degree. The first three years saw a surprising number of us making it to the finishing post of a Diploma in French which, of course, was enough for quite a lot of people. In fact, I was the only one who continued on with languages at that point although one of the original cast has subsequently started down the path of a Diploma in Spanish and another has continued on in step with me but towards a different a different degree.

So, some six years on, two of us will be starting the final course of our respective degrees next February and, hopefully, will both be graduating in Versailles in September 2009.

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