Can we make our own 'from our own correspondent'

[teafortwo]

I love love love this radio show...

news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/default.stm

Can we please please please have a thread that has a vibe a bit like this?

We can have a bunch of parents who live all over the World in all kinds of countries (including Blighty), with all kinds of neighbours and themselves living in all kinds of situations (rural, city, suburbs and anything inbetween) explaining what is happening where they live. Day to day things (what is on sale at your local market, what you ate for lunch), portraits of figures in your community (e.g a lovely old village character), big news stories (e.g student riots), little news stories (a much loved dog has died that used to wander around the town centre), arguements in the cafe (sport, politics, religion), music and dance (e.g I notice all Parisian teenagers like to do this weird wiggling dance and they even have lessons for how to do it on national telly), observations on things that are different from where you come from (I don't know...e.g a New Yorker's take on living in the Lake District), interesting discussions on languages spoken... etc etc... I think it could be fun!!!

So tell me...

Am I making sense?

and..

What do you think? Shall we give it a go?

MmeLindt, dd knows some Dutch children. They segue from Dutch to English and back totally imperceptibly, so poor dd is left bewildered at being 'in' on the conversation at the beginning and end of a sentence but clueless as to what was said in the middle. The children don't seem to know they're doing it - amazing!

Sue - we had some good Dutch friends, with 4 dc, in Douala who are in Lagos now, when they arrived in Cameroon they spoke not a word of English. Only 2.5 years later they were fluent Quite amazing language capacities the Dutch.

I love the Denglish! Ds1 learnt to speak when in Cameroon and one of his first sentances was 'I want debout!'

Superbunny - chair slippers are tennis balls specially cut to cover the ends of the chair leg. It cuts out the noisy scraping of the chairs on the floor.

You buy them in a pack of 4.

Those of you living in places where we Westerners find the local language more difficult to learn, eg. Japan or China, how do you and your DCs cope? Do you speak the language, do your DCs? And are you or the DCs able to write it?

I have been fortunate so far that we have stayed in mainland Europe so the languages are reasonably easy to learn. Well, German was, ask me in a year about French.

Eidsvold
Good to hear that they are sending the copies, better than nothing I suppose.

4gotoIndia
Tell us more please, you have just wetted my appetitie Does the factory just have a sign up or do they really not employ children? Do you eat the coconuts and what do they taste like.

I have only ever eaten coconut at the fair, and I assume that is like comparing fresh peaches to tinned peaches.

Obviously that should read my appetite and not my appetitie (sounds a bit rude)

Hellish
Sorry, but it has to be asked, can you not just buy 2 tennis balls and cut them in half?

I live in Zurich so can be the Swiss correspondent if you like - can tell you all about living near the chocolate factory (smells lovely but does nothing for the diet...) and how all the cows do wear bells (look lovely but are loud...)

Its lovely and sunny here at the moment, DH is bathing the kids and I'm going out to sit with a glass of wine and watch the boats bobbing about on the lake - will raise my glass to you all back in blighty (having fun buying loads of stuff in Tesco...)

Oh do Zurich always sounds so clean and fresh and civilised. Is it so??

WELCOME CSLG - tell us more!!!

CSLG
Hooray! Another Swiss correspondant for me to annoy ask advice about all things Swiss. We are moving to Geneva in 4 weeks and I am sure to have lots and lots of questions.

Can you tell us about the Swiss-German language? All I know that it is very different to Hochdeutsch and that the Swiss football commentator who works for ZDF is difficult to understand if he speaks to his countrymen. Do you speak Swiss German or Hochdeutsch?

I like the sound of watching the boats on the lake with a glass of wine.

Hello!

Questions Questions - always easier to answer after a glass of wine!

Iis nice over here - its more of an outdoor lifestyle (eg skiing in winter, swimming in the lake in summer etc) - weather is better than the UK - propery winters and hotter summers - but it does rain - we had an amazing thunder and lighting storm the other night (cue DH outside going "wow - you have to come look at this" :-) )

As for the Hochdeutsch - I know about 3 words! I do go to classes to learn high german - but everyone speaks english to me the minute I say anything - they are keen to practice and probably more keen for me to stop mispronouncing everything.... I think the 2nd language in all the schools is becoming english so that will make it easier for me to help with the little ones homework....

Moondog
If you have a moment, there is a thread over here where your opinion would be very helpful.

TheM&M, are your friends' initials 'R'(him) & 'A'(her) 'S'?

4gotoIndia - wow - what a post - sorry I somehow missed it earlier - please please please tell us more!!!!

My DH is crazy for Indian cooking - please send any recipes this way too!!!

and... effie - look back at what me and QS said about London - I think most readers and writers of this thread would love love love a London fooc!

Goodness Moondog. You were very organised. I need to start my xmas shopping. I want to avoid amazon.co.uk but with the price of postage, I may have to.

I always find it strange how you have to provide your own school supplies in North America. Including chair slippers. That did make me laugh!

Hi Moondog - that thread is about SALT? Is that where I was meant to go??

well I just wanted to share from a special needs point of view. Here in Australia you do not get DLA. I get a carer allowance for me as I am the carer of dd1 - I will get this until she is 16. At 16 she qualifies for a disability pension.

As part of that carer allowance - we were getting bonus payments - last ones were $1000 which covers dd1's private SALT for a year. I get no other things for that. So we get no council tax and that sort of relief. No utility relief - nothing. The payment is around $90 a fortnight.

However just recently they introduced a carer card where carers like me can access businesses who offer discounts to carer's like me. SO I applied last week and my card arrived today. Looking forward to surfing the website to see who offers discount - it can be on services or travel or anything apparently.

There is also another type of carer payment which is given to people who may not be able to work due to the type of care they have to give to someone with special needs. There are other benefits that those carers get.

I am also eligible on a state and federal government level for assistance with continence products. As dd1 is still not toilet trained the state government will subsidise my pull ups - so I get so many for a 6 month period and when they run out - I buy the rest. I recently learnt that now she is over 5 - we also qualify on a federal level for $480 dollars per year to be spent on continence products. I had my eye on some fabulous ( more grown up and comfy) training pants but at $14 a pair - it gets quite expensive if you want to buy 10!!!! We applied late last week and I got a letter on Monday along with a catalogue !!! COuld not believe the turn around.

I would hate to have to buy products for someone who is never going to be continent as it gets steep. Even with that allowance for each year - people must spent a fortune on products - some that would be one use. I was stunned as to how expensive things were.

SO - that is a little peek into another side of living in Australia - living with special needs. There is lot more I can share about that BUT am just pleased about some help that we are able to access for dd1.

At one stage we had three in nappies and it was getting mighty expensive. I had dd3 in cloth and that helped BUT boy!! Now I have one in pull ups, one toilet trained and one in nappies.

Tinto here, reporting from Sydney.
Olympic athletes flew back from Beijing this morning. The prime minister gave a lovely speech about how proud we all were of them. Then he turned to the cycling team and said "Except you, you losers. How dare you let those brits ride past you like that! You should be ashamed of yourselves". (or did I imagine that?).
Sad story of a baby whale who got separated/abandoned by its mother and came into Sydney waters looking for food. They had to put the poor thing down. General community outrage and outpouring of emotion.
Until next time ...

tinto I thought I heard Kevin pledging millions so we could beat the brits at 2012

Money well spent, money well spent.

on Mon 25-Aug-08 15:11:31 MmeLindt wrote:
Those of you living in places where we Westerners find the local language more difficult to learn, eg. Japan or China, how do you and your DCs cope? Do you speak the language, do your DCs? And are you or the DCs able to write it?

Just ploughing through the FOOC thread, having been in the UK for 3 weeks.
Now back in Japan.....
To answer your question, MmeLindt - I studied Japanese to degree level before I came to live here. I am married to a Japanese man, and our kids are in the state education system, with Japanese as their first language. Japanese is not so difficult to learn to speak, but the writing system is a bugger, with three different scripts to learn (modified Chinese characters (kanji) for vocab, hiragana syllabic script for grammar etc, and katakana syllabic script to transcribe foreign words). Children are taught about 900 kanji characters in primary school, and a further 900 over the course of their secondary education. They learn the roman alphabet too, mainly for computer use.
I am quite glad we are in Japan and so will learn to read and write Japanese as a given - if we lived in the UK, I think it would be quite difficult to keep up the hard work of memorizing the characters....
They start English conversation in primary school (as part of international studies) and then begin English language as a subject in earnest at junior high school level.
My two DCs can understand English (and can communicate fine with cousins in the UK) but don't speak it with me, as they know I can understand Japanese.

I do know that other Western mums who don't read Japanese find it quite difficult when it comes to understanding letters/notices from school, or helping with homework.

Ex-pats in Tokyo usually send their kids to (very expensive) international schools - which have varying amounts of exposure to Japanese language ( a lesson or two a week at most)

OK, signing off now - sayonara