The phenomenon of culture shock is seldom dealt with directly. In scientific literature, it is relegated to intercultural studies. In popular scientific literature, there are experts such as Chen (see below) who always have difficulty describing a culture without sounding cliché. The risk of doing so is normal and cannot be avoided. However, those who…
Impressive !
French learning commercial:
In North Africa we met a man who had lived in Munich for eight years and spoke passable German. We asked him whether he had had any problems settling in and being accepted there. No, he hadn’t, he replied, and went on to say that he had found out pretty soon that there are two…
For five weeks now we’ve been back in Aix in France in a conference centre. We’re chipping in with all sorts of practical jobs to help polish our French. If we thought we knew France before, we were mistaken: only now we are getting to know it for real. For here we are totally immersed…
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text] Anna sometimes felt she had missed something because she’d never been at university. Le voilà, as the French say, what do you know, then it happened: Anna is sitting at her desk and writes her first thesis on Guy de Maupassant’s illnesses. And take an expert’s word for it: that was certainly university level,…
We should have known: The moment we arrive in another country, some health problem arises and we have to figure out an alien healthcare system. Anna probably already had a mild flu when she boarded the plane. Now the unfamiliar climate and the stress have triggered it again. Anna asks around among our colleagues and…
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text] We haven’t been in Aix-en-Provence for two weeks yet when Mike wants to take some photos of our house to show them on the home page later. So he takes the elevator from the 8th floor down to ground floor and ambles across the square, half of which is a parking lot, the other…
In the first part of this article I wrote that the EuroCom method – also know as “Seven Sieves” – draws primarily on common elements in vocabulary and our understanding of language structure, in order to acquire in just a few hours the ability to read a foreign language. Now I want to take you…
submarine, président, acção, problemă – we can understand lots of English and French words, even Portuguese and Romanian ones, without having actually studied those languages properly. The examples above all belong to the vocabulary of the Romance family of languages, although there are equivalents in the Germanic and Slavic languages. Look at the example below,…