Foreign Perspectives

Archive for January, 2007

We introduced our series on buying a house in France in the last part of the series. Planning your move is essential, the next most important thing is acquiring fluency in the language.

This aspect will take you the longest period of time so it’s best to start work on it first. You might think that it’s an impossible thing to do or that it will take many years. Fortunately neither is the case and even if you are starting from no knowledge whatsoever of the language you can become fluent in as little as two or three years.

When I started off with the French after a long break, I was expecting it to take many years before I became fluent but in reality it was only two and could have been done in one. So how did I do it?

I was starting off from a very rusty O-Level (GCSE) so thought that a couple of years of night classes would be best to get my French back up to speed again after such a long break. Those night classes (2 hours a week for 20 weeks per year) took me up to roughly A-level conversational French but that’s not really fluency in the sense that I couldn’t chat in French.

The next step was to join a conversation class with the Alliance Francaise in September. I thoroughly recommend them but you need to be aware that the classes can be incredibly intimidating initially and you have to be stubborn enough to just keep going regardless of how dreadful you feel you are doing.

The Alliance Francaise classes operate at a much higher level than A-level French. At A-level you are expected to be able to talk about a range of topics if you know what the topic is in advance (hence you can’t chat at that level), the level above at that is to be able to chat about a range of topics which you don’t know in advance. Alliance Francaise operates at the level about that ie you should be able to talk about anything without being told the topic in advance.

Now you might think that there is absolutely no way you could do that. However, even a GCSE gives you all the vocabulary and grammar that you need. What the Alliance Francaise classes do is to force you to use that knowledge in real time and that’s why the classes are so intimidating at the start.

Anyway, the following September I started the Open University course L120 and did the related residential LXR122 that July. Whilst the Alliance Francaise classes are brilliant for getting your current level of French working much better they aren’t very good for improving your level of French so that’s where the Open University courses come in.

Right in the middle of the residential it was like someone had flicked a switch and all of a sudden I heard the French as though it were English. I’d to meet some French relatives after the course that Summer and was able to chat to them with no effort ie fluently.

So to get to fluency, one route is GCSE, Alliance Francaise and then Open University first year with the residential. I’m sure that’s less time than you expected!

The one thing that is key with learning French is to be stubborn enough to keep going to the classes regardless of how dreadful you feel you are doing. Yes, you will be really bad at the start but the trick with learning languages is to keep going regardless. That’s one reason why I feel it’s essential to be in a class rather than attempting to learn the language on your own. On your own you can easily grind to a halt on some topic which you just can’t understand but in a class environment, the class will force you to simply skip that topic and move on which is OK because you’ll come back to it later.

Our next issue is on staying fluent which, if anything, is more difficult as it feels much more like a chore.

Blogging is a peculiar activity.With a normal website, you can look at the stats and see how many people are looking at your pages and even how they found them in most cases. With blogs, the site stats reveal only the tip of the iceberg. For instance, whilst we only get a relatively small jump in recorded views of Foreign Perspectives any time we put on a new entry, we get quite a leap in all the sites that we refer to so there’s clearly a lot of behind the scenes viewing of the entries. That’s down to the facility called RSS feeds by which people can view the site via the various blog listing sites. Anyway, net effect is that I’ve no idea how many people are actually reading the site.

Most people have their holiday in France during the Summer but in many ways that’s one of the worst times to come.For a start, France largely closes down in August so you can often find places closed. Those that are open are very crowded as the majority of the French take their holidays from mid-July to the penultimate week in August so you’ll often find hotels full during that period and, of course, the prices are at their peak too.

The Winter in France is quite different. Prices are lower and most places are open so you won’t have any problem getting somewhere to stay and, naturally, the flight prices are a good deal lower. One thing that does close is the hotels, usually from October to March but there remains a lot of availability as the number of tourists drops substantially. One that doesn’t is the Auberge Mas Camps which is open all year and has an ideal location between the mountains and the sea.

Isn’t it cold? In the central, northern and mountain areas, yes it is. In the south it’s cold in the evenings but it’s frequently t-shirt weather during the day and indeed I’m writing this in a t-shirt whilst thinking about getting the shorts out, right in the middle of January! Don’t go by what the locals are wearing as you often see them wearing heavy Winter clothing when the temperatures are in the high 20s.

You’ll also find that the villages and towns are a good deal more French in the Winter too. The absence of tourists makes quite a difference and, especially if you’re considering a purchase here, it’s definitely worth a visit over the Winter period.

As the number of house buyers looking at France seems once more to be on the increase, we’re starting a little series today which will take you through all the steps from when you first have the idea of moving to France or just buying a Summer home here to settling in.

Over the course of our little series, we’ll cover all aspects of buying a house in France in enough detail to let you do it with the least amount of hassle. If you’ve already started you can skip a few chapters so to speak by consulting our Moving to France guide and if you’re even further ahead and beginning to settle in our Living in France guide. If you need any services, try our expat services directory; it may be smaller than yahoo but it’s a lot easier to find the services that you’ll require in it.

So, once you’ve decided that you’d like to buy a house in France, where do you start?

Buying a house in France or any country other than your own is a major undertaking and you should never underestimate the amount of work that it will involve. Not only is the language different but the processes that you need to go through are different from those in your own country. Moreover, if you are intending to live full-time in the house then you’ll need to organise moving your furniture from one country to another which is never cheap. That’s before you even consider that chances are you’re moving from somewhere in a town or city to somewhere in a country and even doing that in your own country can be a bit of a culture shock before you start adding in the complications of a new language, culture, social security systems and the like.

With so many things to consider you might be thinking that it’s an impossible task. It’s not, but you do need to put a fair amount of effort into the planning of your move if you want it to be a success and that’s where this series will help you as it will cover all aspects of buying a house in France over the course of the next few months but in bite-size chunks so that you’re not overwhelmed by it.

Planning your move is very much key to a succesful move to France. To do this you will need to sit down and sketch out all the things that you need to do and when they need to be done. The list will be very long, but don’t worry about that, just try to make sure that everything that needs to be done is on the list and it will all work out in the end.

Anyway, that’s probably enough of an introduction for now. Over the coming weeks, we hope to provide you with information on everything that you need to know in order to plan your move to France.

In our next installment we’ll be covering the one thing that will make most difference in easing your transition to France: the language.

We realised quite quickly in our first Summer here was that we couldn’t cope with doing the laundry once we’d more than 2 or 3 rooms occupied, a problem made worse by the relatively high proportion of overnighters that we had that first year.