Foreign Perspectives

One of the ongoing discussions since November in our little household is: “how come YOUR blog is OK and MINE isn’t?”.

Well, thankfully after over a month of hassling google, Cultured Views is once more back at PR2.

How did we get it back? Well, you’ve to register for google’s webmaster tools section, then claim the site and finally send a grovelling message to them saying that you’ve added “nofollow” tags to your sponsored posts and please can you have your pagerank back.

The snag is that adding “nofollow” just to sponsored posts doesn’t seem to be easily doable at the moment (ie there’s no plugin to do it) and therefore we’ve got nofollow on all outgoing links which seems somewhat counter-productive to google’s stated aim of identifying sponsored posts vs those that aren’t sponsored.

I’m just about to start the final course of my modern languages degree and although it’s actually the English course whereas all the others were in foreign languages, I’m finding that I’m dreading that first tutorial just the same!

Still, at least I shouldn’t find myself wanting to ask a question yet not knowing what the words are which can happen sometimes in the foreign language tutorials. It’ll be the very first tutorial that I’ve done in english for over 15 years so I’m sure it’ll feel a little bit peculiar.

In fact the first tutorial is a couple of days before the official starting date for the course so I’m not sure what we’ll be getting up to in it. Also it’s supposed to be an e-learning course so I’m not sure why there are any in-person tutorials at all although to be fair there are only four of them listed whereas normally there’d be something like twice that number for a course at this level.

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.