Foreign Perspectives

Several months ago, we implemented a new facility on the websites designed to track where people were coming from when they signed up on our site.

One of the side-effects of that upgrade was that we could begin to offer in effect an affiliate programme for the first time. All that people needed to do was to include a reference code in their referral link and we’d pay them up to $20 for each property which subsequently signed up with us.

We’ve not really promoted that terribly widely as yet as we wanted a proper guinea pig to try it out for us before we released it on a widespread basis. Anyway, said guinea pig has turned up in the form of our friends in the Dordogne and we’re pleased to say that we’ll be making the first payment to him this evening.

Hopefully that’ll be the first of many payments in the months to come!

At first thought, it probably seems to make a lot of sense to start speaking French to your children if you’re planning on moving to France and to keep doing that after you’ve moved. However, that first thought is very definitely wrong!

Unless you are a native French speaker, your accent, vocabulary and grammar just aren’t going to be perfect. Of these the accent is most noticeably a problem with many children from english speaking families still saying BON JUR rather than BOZHUR even many years after they have settled into a French school. However, both the vocabulary and the grammar are a problem too in that the French which children speak isn’t quite the same as that which adults speak so that you’ll often find it easy enough to chat in French to adults but really struggle in talking to their children.

Perhaps the greatest aspect of the problem is that if you stick to not-quite-perfect French with your children and they’re fairly young when you start down that path (say, under 5) then they may well grow up without any solid “native” language at all. This effect takes some years to be really noticeable but eventually you’ll find that you can’t explain how some aspect of grammar is supposed to work to them, not because your language ability isn’t up to it, but because they just don’t have a solid understanding of how any language works.

However, even if you get past those problems and are blissfully assuming that your children will grow up bilingual just naturally: you’re wrong, because they won’t unless you work at it. One of the most difficult people to speak to that I’ve ever met was an “English” estate agent who’d been born 20-odd years ago in France to English parents. He’d never been to England and never had the opportunity to even see British TV nor read English books or magazines so the only English he’d heard was from his parents. Net effect was that he had a perfect English accent when he spoke but was neither fluent not could he understand English spoken to him by anyone other than his parents. However, even these days few parents put any effort into building the English of their children and just assume that they’ll pick it up from them: this doesn’t work because the majority of English that you learn is at school therefore unless your children are going to a bilingual or english speaking school, they simply won’t learn it.

So, no, don’t speak French to your kids but do make a point of developing their english speaking, listening, reading and writing abilities.

When it’s cold and dreary at home it seems that many people get going on their summer holiday plans if the stats on our various listings sites are anything to go by.

In December, there’s just too much focus on the Christmas period of course what with shopping and the sheer volume of work that goes into sorting out the Christmas celebrations for most people. So, for the most part people begin their holiday planning for the upcoming summer in the first or second week of January and thereby snap up the bargains.

We’re already seeing a big jump upwards in the searches arriving on the self-catering booking sites reflecting that holiday planning activity and have seen some bookings already for the peak summer period so some of the better places have already been booked. Actually, the very best places tend to get booked not too long after the previous summer!

Anyway, if you’ve not yet started on sorting out the plans for your summer holiday, it would be best to get going on that now to give yourself the widest possible selection of places to choose from.

In years gone by people might think you a little crazy to buy a professional SLR but at least you could keep taking photos with it for many years to come and indeed I still have my Nikon F3 bought shortly after they came out in 1980 and it takes photos just as well now as it did then.

Digital cameras are a different matter though.

I’ve a couple of photos taken with a professional digital camera way back in 1997. The £2000 camera used to take them was the top of the line at the time and yet these days the 640×480 resolution would be laughed at as even the cheapest of digital cameras can better that.

It’s the same today too. You can spent £3400 on a new Nikon D3 and bask in the luxury of 12.8mp images. On the other hand you could spend around £400 on a Nikon D40X and have pretty respectable 10mp images. That’s not to say that the extra 2.8mp isn’t worth having but rather that chances are that the successor to the D40X will probably cost around the £400 mark and offer it potentially as soon as next year; certainly two years on and the D40X’s successor will have a good deal higher resolution than the D3 and more than likely still be around 10% of the price.

So, as with computers, the best strategy is probably to buy the cheapest DSLR in the range with a view to replacing it in, say, two or three years time with the latest edition of the same model.

All the mobile phone companies offer to move your existing number from another provider thus letting you retain your existing number.

Unfortunately, that service doesn’t yet exist for e-mail addresses. That wouldn’t be too bad but many people tend to just use the e-mail address provided by their ISP so if they move house or change ISP you lose touch with them. Others seem to flit from one freebie e-mail provider to another pretty much all the time thus making their e-mail address pretty much useless.

It doesn’t need to be like that though. All you need to do is to buy a domain (costing as little as £5/year) which’ll come with an e-mail facility. This frees you forever from being tied to an ISP and telling people that you’ve changed your e-mail.

Which is how come I’ve had the same e-mail address for ten years now.