Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Miscellaneous’ Category

After well over 10 years attempting to learn French, Spanish and even a little Greek I can confidently tell you that the answer is: “it depends”.

Consider Greek for instance. I did a six week class on that about 15 or so years ago and that was enough to be able to understand a good deal of what the shop assistants were saying between themselves, to read the direction signs on the roads and even to communicate a little in the language too. It worked for Greek because it doesn’t have anything like the number of irregular verbs and exceptions to rules that the languages which came afterwards added. Also, because a large part of our own language is taken from Greek anyway and they take modern terms from us, there’s a large common pool of language to draw on.

For French, I made a series of abortive attempts to learn with the likes of Berlitz and it just didn’t work. Why? Well, when you’re learning a language on your own it’s easy to grind to a halt when you get to a difficult topic or one which you simply don’t understand at all. In a class-room environment you just can’t do that as the class moves on and besides in a language course, you’ll always come back to a topic that you didn’t understand the first time around. Ultimately what sorted me out with that was the combination of a conversation class plus a distance learning course.

Spanish is fundamentally easier to learn than French as they tend to take words straight from the English whereas French tends to make up a new French word in similar circumstances. However, having reached fluency in French I found that I was able to reach fluency in Spanish with, largely, only the distance learning course.

If it’s your first foreign language, I think that you’re going to need a class room environment at least to begin with. You can get the basics from an online course and you should try to do that as it’ll help you later on but to get to a reasonable level of fluency you need a class or course to drive you on past those initial difficult parts – essentially to get you into the habit of saying “OK, I don’t understand that right now, but I will later”.

For your second foreign language it’s a different matter though. You’ll know how language learning works and therefore you won’t necessarily need a course schedule to drive you onwards. Whether you can do completely without the schedule of a course depends largely on you.

As it happens, I’m toying with the idea of going back to one of the teach yourself methods with another language: German this time. I think that it’ll work for me this time around because 1) I’ve been through the process of learning a foreign language three times now and 2) German is more similar in structure to English than any of the three languages that I’ve tried to learn up to now.

One very easy way to eat up a whole day (or sometimes days) is to start thinking that you’d like a new theme for your blog and then get going on looking through what’s around.

There seem to be thousands of themes knocking around these days and nearly all of them free which makes for something of an overwhelming range of options.

Narrowing them down is far from easy. OK, you can usually rule out those with one column (no sidebars to play with so the screen content seems to go on forever) and four columns (too wide for most screens around these days) but beyond that there’s not much you can do to thin out the numbers.

Sure, they are all tagged with keywords but the relevancy of many of them is very debateable so you end up having to work through large numbers of them to find what you’re looking for. Oh, and do you really know what you’re looking for in the first place?

Finally, there’s the “small” problem that you don’t really know how your blog will look ’til you try out the theme. Net effect of this is that I’ve downloaded about 50 this afternoon and started looking through them.

So far, I’ve a short-list of three for On A Postcard (now flying with the new theme) and something similar for this blog although I’ve not quite got the “perfect” one for Foreign Perspectives yet.

We’ve been having really great weather over the last week or more so it’s all the more depressing that we’re back to what we’d expect to be normal February weather here ie dull and wet.

Funnily enough we’re almost at the end of February and it’s only now that we’re getting the kind of weather that we should have been getting since late December.

It’s confusing the plants as well as us as we’ve several trees with green shoots on them already!

I thought that it was time I spruced up the look of the blogs that I run so I’ve been looking for a new theme off and on over the last few weeks. Today though was a bit of a marathon session when I picked up over 20 potential themes and am in the process of trying them out on the blogs.

It’s a very easy way to find yourself at the end of the day with nothing of any consequence done as there are dozens of sites listing untold thousands of WordPress themes, the vast majority of which are free.

I’ve barely scratched the surface but to give you some idea of where you can look, here’s very much a partial list of places:

http://www.wordpresstheme.in/
http://www.devhunters.com/
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/
http://www.wpskins.org
http://www.bobek.co.uk/blog/
http://www.themesbase.com
http://themes.blogflux.com
http://www.themebot.com
http://www.fresheezy.com
http://www.freewordpressthemes.com
http://www.ithemes.org
http://www.themes.rock-kitty.net
http://www.WPThemesFree.com
http://www.web2feel.com
http://www.wordpresswow.com
http://www.themes.iwebnet.org
http://www.themevibes.com
http://www.wptheme.net
http://www.bloggingthemes.com
http://www.wpsnap.com
http://www.freewpthemes.info
http://www.webpuffs.net
http://www.freelayouts.com
http://www.templatenavigator.com
http://www.osskins.com/
http://www.unmatchedthemes.com
http://www.thatsprofound.com
http://themeboss.com/
http://themes.mygreencorner.com/
http://wptemplates.org/
http://www.wpthemesarchive.com/
http://www.themehq.com

Which doesn’t even include the (dire) WordPress theme viewer itself!

One of the problems with paid posting sites is that the majority of them expect you to know how much your blog is worth which, for most bloggers, is the one thing that they know next to nothing about.

That being the case, you often find “high value” bloggers writing substantial posts for $5 when they could just as easily be writing shorter ones for $50. They’re not crazy, they just don’t know what their blog is worth.

So, it’s nice to see that SnapBomb have taken away all that guesswork. Signup with them and within a few minutes their system produces a price range for your blog. Why the range? Well, as they explain on their blog most blogs will have a certain base value but that value can be enhanced if the blog is particularly attractive to an advertiser’s campaign. Thus, you can have a range from, say, $25 to $100. A generic post might get the $25 end of that range but if you’re in the right market segment for a campaign you’d get closer to the $100.

Also good is that signup is pretty much instant and there’s no delay before you can start writing posts for them. Payment is 60 days after taking the post and you’ve 12 hours to do the writing.