Here we are in France, taking a taxi to leave the airport, and I pretend to understand French. We would have preferred to rent a car, but it was so expensive that we would have had to sell one of our children to pay for it. Although this would have reduced the overall cost of our vacation, it was probably not a good idea! Result: an hour at the side of the driver, refusing to admit that the words that come out of his mouth to go into my ears only fly out the passenger window.
I do my best to try to understand it. I wait to have recognized the words and sentences well before answering as best as possible. But, while I’ve been trying to learn French correctly for decades, I still can’t when it comes to expressing myself in this language.
The taxi ride is just a repeat of what happened at the time of booking over the phone. As usual, it was my wife who had taken on this difficult task, but, as the language barrier proved delicate, I offered to help her. “Wait, my husband speaks French!” she had explained to her interlocutor, before handing me the phone.
Forty-five seconds later, she and I had learned that in fact I could not speak French… At least not out of the blue, nor on the telephone, where conversation, stripped of any gesture or facial expression, is reduced to the most annoying elements: vocabulary, grammar, tenses, gender, language expressions…
Perfect pronunciation of the word “croissant”
And yet, I tried… I tried before we left for France
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The Times (London)The oldest of the British dailies (1785) and the best known abroad has belonged since 1981 to Rupert Murdoch. It has long been the reference newspaper and the voice of the establishment. Today, it has lost some of its influence and gossip accuses it of reflecting the conservative ideas of its owner. The Times switched to tabloid format in 2004.
Determined to no longer provide all its content for free, the British daily inaugurated in June 2010 a paid formula which obliges Internet users to subscribe to have access to its articles. Four months after the launch of the operation, the newspaper publishes the first results eagerly awaited by other press players: 105,000 people have become customers of its electronic offers. Among them, about half are regular subscribers to the various versions offered [site Internet, iPad et Kindle]. The others are occasional buyers. These figures, deemed satisfactory by the management of the Times should encourage other newspapers to accelerate their march towards paid access.
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