Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Miscellaneous’ Category

That’s a common question from our guests lately.

Why would be speak French though? He’s only three so he doesn’t go to school yet and therefore doesn’t hear much French. Yes, he was born in France and so he is Frecnh but that doesn’t mean that he popped out speaking French. That’s something that needs to be learnt.

In fact, even James who does go to school doesn’t speak French. How come? Everyone picks it up after a few months in those moving to France TV programmes. Well, we’re in an area where there are very few resident foreigners so the schools don’t have the experience of dealing with them. What they did was to put him in a small class (four other kids) with a teacher who spoke a little English. After about three months, the children started speaking English learnt from him (not a development that went down well with the other parents) and even now a year later he just speaks isolated words like for the numbers or colours and doesn’t form French sentences.

Will he speak it by the time he goes to primary school? Somehow I doubt it but we’ll see.

There’s only a couple of weeks to go to the Spanish exam and seemingly way too much stuff to be done for it.

For a change the Open University are experimenting with the use of a photograph as the stimulus for the oral exam. This means that we’ve three articles about Spanish painting and culture in the 19th and 20th centuries to read at the moment and will be handed a photo on the day itself. Then we’ve 10 minutes to prepare a 3 minute presentation on that photo using information from the texts that they’ve given us.

I suspect that it’ll work out OK as it usually seems to with the Spanish. Unlike the French department they seem to be on the level and trying to see you at your best rather than having some trick question as seemed all too common in the French course. The overall effect of that difference was that my French marks seemed to be almost random whereas the Spanish marks have been very consistent.

That also leaves the final book of the course to complete which is fair to middling essential as I think the written question will be based on it.

We seem to be getting more and more popular with the Spanish looking for a short break outside Spain.

As we’re within two hours drive of Barcelona, it’s an easy trip for them yet it’s a very different area than they’re used to. For one thing Barcelona is a very active city whereas we’re in a very quiet area. However, people tend to like to get away somewhere “different” for their breaks and although we’re right beside Spain the local culture is very different.

But then it’s always been like that. So we’ve no idea why we’ve started picking up Spanish guests in increasing numbers. They all love it though!

Starting from early in the Summer, payperpost dropped the number of paid posts allowed per blog from 3 to 2 which combined with the lower average payout per post over the Summer dropped everybodys’ income fairly drastically.

The reverse situation is coming into effect now. For a few weeks the number of paid opportunities has been growing rapidly as had the average amount on offer. As of today PPP are taking the number of posts per blog per day up to 3 again which has already added $10/blog for us (ie, in theory, potentially $300/month).

Of course, the big question is whether or not we’ll actually be able to keep up the pace with the blogs… three in a row is a bit much but that’s OK as we can space them out throughout the day. However, it’ll soon be six when our next blog comes of age later this month and, perhaps, nine by Christmas…

Still, I imagine that the bank won’t complain too much.

Now and again we get asked that and it’s far from an easy question to answer as we don’t know anything about the people asking it.

For example, we get lots of walkers and cyclists staying with us. They usually don’t need a car but sometimes they do in that they want to walk in a number of number of different types of scenery.

Depending on where you want to go, you can do quite well with public transport or, alternatively, see nothing at all of interest to you.

If you’d like to go to the beach, it’s quite easy from here on the bus for instance. However, if you want to see the castles then you’re going to need a car unless you’re fairly fit and can cycle or walk to them.

So, if you want a sensible answer, don’t just ask us if you need a car: tell us what things you want to see, whether you like walking or cycling, and so on so that we can give you the correct answer.