Foreign Perspectives

Doing the English component of my modern languages degree as the very last course after years of learning both French and Spanish gives a slightly peculiar perspective.

For one thing, I know a lot of the linguistics words that they’re using but I only know the French and Spanish words for the relevant terms. It’s a little peculiar being able to speak about English using French or Spanish words!

It’s taught quite differently to the foreign language components too and seems, to me, much easier than they were even though, in principle, this course is at the same educational level as the foreign language ones. One very noticeable aspect of this is that I find that I can work on the English well into the evening whereas I couldn’t do that with either the French or the Spanish until towards the end of those segments.

The course starts off with something of a potted history of the English language itself and in particular it homes in one how very old English words and expressions live on in many of the dialects that are spoken around the UK today. Interestingly, some of these are now strongly associated with particular regions whereas they’d have been used throughout what is now the UK several centuries ago. For example, “wee” is very much seen as a Scottish term for “small” but it’s actually an Old English word dating back over 1000 years and one of many where the Scots even retain the phraseology of Old English in their use of it.

If you’re ever leafing through blogs that do sponsored posts there seem to be two basic styles that people use when writing them.

First, there are those which are pure advertising. They have written exactly what the advertiser has asked for and nothing else. Commonly in these you’ll get extensive repetition of phrases along the lines “you must visit this site”, “you really must visit this site”, “this is a great site to visit”. You might think that nobody would do that but that’s taken from a real-life example where those phrases were used in the first, and only, short paragraph about the product. It’s quite clear that the writers of those know next to nothing about the product and they’re a shining example of why google felt it necessary to knock a wide range of blogs down to PR0: they add nothing to the information available on the Internet.

The other type are quite different. Yes, they have the links that the advertisers asked for but they use those merely as starting points to write about the topic. Frequently, you’ll find that these posts are much longer than the length which the advertiser asked for. They don’t scream out “buy this” and often don’t even mention the advertiser by name. In fact, they’re often hardly distinguishable from a normal post on the blog which is really how it should be I think although perhaps some would argue that these are very much subliminal advertising and would prefer not to find at the end of a post that they’d been reading an advert. I don’t agree with that point of view basically because this style of sponsored post tends to be an advert only in name and, by and large, they’re normal posts except that they have a link in them that ordinarily wouldn’t be there.

What’s very common too is that the first style tends to be associated with absolutely dreadful spelling and grammar whilst the second type read more like an article for want of a better word.

Ironically, the first type are more commonly what advertisers want yet the second type are much more effective in providing the in-context links that they actually need. Just as in real-life, people often ask for what they want rather than what they need!

It looks like that for a second year running winter has pretty much passed us by.

The trees are already showing signs of greenery and many of the fruit trees are already flowering. Good for us, of course, but it looks like the local ski resorts have had another pretty poor year as there wasn’t a whole lot of snow on the mountain just behind us which is usually completely covered from November through to April.

Just as well we didn’t restock on the heating oil!

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.