Financial & Travel Musings

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It seems that virtually all parents who move to another country just assume that their children will grow up bilingual without any effort on their part. After all, they’ll learn English at home and the native language at school. It’s obvious, isn’t it?

Whilst that might sound logical, in fact that’s rarely what actually happens.

For one thing, unless you teach them to read and write in English then if they’re going to school in, say, France then they’re not going to be able to do either unless it’s taught in the school and even then it’ll be as a foreigner.

Even the spoken language is decidedly dodgy if you think about it. After all, the majority of the language that you use as an adult is language that you learnt at school rather than from your parents and so if your children are going to a school in a foreign language then they simply aren’t going to learn adult English.

In practice, what seems to happen is that, unless the parents work at it, the children grow up speaking the English of about an 8 or 9 year old if they’ve move prior to reaching that age. For those older (and this includes adults!), their English basically stops at the level it was when they moved abroad.

Surely I can’t include adults in that statement? Well, yes. Think about it. If you’d moved here even 10 years ago, chances are you’d not know the English words for Internet, e-mail, etc. So, yes, your English stops developing too.Don’t forget the education that children here won’t get. If they move over between 11 and 18 then they won’t learn the English versions of all those words that they’d have picked up during their GCSE and A-levels. In fact, if they went to age 16 here and tried to move back to do A-levels, they would have a very restricted range of subjects that they’d be able to do. History? No chance: they’d be taught that Nelson was the enemy for instance. Geography: would they know that the Etats-Unis was America? English: no chance, naturally, as they’d have been taught English as a foreign language. In fact, apart from French, it’s doubtful if they would be able to do A-levels.

The effect is much more noticeable in younger children. Try talking to someone who was born abroad to English parents. Unless their parents have done something about it, chances are that you’d find it very difficult to speak to them. Such children are rarely fluent in English.

What can you do about it though?

Up to age 11 it’s fairly easy. Just get the likes of the Ladybird and Usborne books and read to them and let them watch English TV channels. That should keep them fairly much up with the English that they’d have spoken if they’d have remained in the UK.

Beyond that, it’s much harder. I suspect you’d need to send them to a bilingual school (note: international schools are quite different).

Anyway, something to think about. Most people don’t get as far as thinking about it so you’re way ahead already.

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In days gone by, universities offered nice simple “packaged degrees”. Oh, sure you could vary the optional courses within one of their packages but, by and large, they stuck to the tried and trusted combinations such as BSc in physics, BA in English and whatnot.

These days though, flexibility is the name of the game and perhaps the ultimate in that game is the Open University. In addition to their general degree, they offer what’s quite a bewildering range of named degrees.

For example (and this is a simple example), in my own case I am on my (hopefuly) final course for a BA Hons Modern Languages in French and Spanish. Except that it’s not so simple because right now I could claim a BA degree and (all being well) I will also have the choice of a BA Hons degree as an alternative to the Modern Languages named one.

Had I changed one course I could have had a BA Hons European Studies or the modern languages in French & English or Spanish & English. Change two courses and you can add combinations such as BA Hons Humanities, BA French & Law, and many others.

What adds even more complexity is that the OU degrees are normally taken part-time so that they can span anything up to 12 years which is obviously quite a lot of time in which to change your original plans and many people do that of course (me included: I never dreamt that one day I’d be talking about finishing a modern languages degree).

Whilst this flexibility is, on the whole, a “good thing”, you do need to keep an eye on what you’re doing to avoid ending up with a rag-bag collection of subjects within your degree. If you’re planning on doing something with it some kind of focus is essential to avoid confusing potential employers. That’s not to say that you can’t throw in the oddball course that you always wanted to do (mine may be their Creative Writing course) but it’s best avoiding the temptation to do a lot of unrelated courses.

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Not so long ago the list of things that you could legitimately carry on board with you was long: a case (up to 110 cm total dimensions) plus an assortment of “personal items” which included such things as a handbag, coat, umbrella, walking stick, camera, a reasonable amount of reading material, essential medication, binoculars, briefcase or laptop and a musical instrument. Bring a child and you can add a child seat and can take the pram up to the aircraft door.

Although those were the former “official” items that you could take, in practice bags substantially larger could usually be taken and, of course, you could always add even more courtesy of the dutyfree shops that you reached after checkin which naturally was never even weighed. Oh, and let’s not forget the various exceptions that were often made too.

Fly from most countries today though and you’ll find that things are considerably more strict. The bag is still the same size (after a brief shrinking to 55cm) but not all umbrellas are allowed and you’re actually going to need to use that walking stick for it to be allowed. Even medication is now often limited to a 100ml bottle size and should also fit inside your trusty resealable plastic bag too.

Yet, desipite all the fuss that they tend to make over what are very small things (notably that plastic bag I find), security levels are, if anything, getting lower because the security staff are going increasingly from a checklist rather than knowing why things are being done which can’t be good.

For example, on my last trip I found that they fixated on my lack of small plastic bag to hold 2 30ml containers. That fixation meant that they ignored 1) the six inch steel pin 2) the steel spring 3) the contents of the 30ml containers and 4) the cake. The cake? Well, a cake nicely iced with the look and consistency of plastic explosive in a sealed plastic container should have meant that they insisted on the container being opened so that the cake could be checked for traces of explosive.

So what really should be allowed on? No problem with the carryon bag sitting at the long-established 110cm standard size. If it’s filled with electronics then they may well need to be checked separately but given my recent experience I don’t believe that the people looking at the screens have the knowledge or experience to detect a real item from a bomb. They should insist that the items are switched on: that’s a simpler and more reliable way of checking that they’re the real thing. After all, batteries aren’t that clear on a scanner so why should anyone assume that scanning one means anything?

Fair enough on largely banning the sharp items and on using the plastic bag as a means of checking the volume of the containers in it and letting the staff read the labels but, really, the staff should know that it’s used for those reasons and if they don’t then they need better training. They should be checking the liquids too because any people are now using resealable bottles to get down to the 100ml and therefore reading the labels doesn’t provide any reliable information about the current contents yet you often see security staff closely examining the labels to decide if the liquid is allowed onboard. The original reason for the clear plastic bag was so that they could check the contents yet that’s no longer a valid reason given the much higher usage of resealable plastic bottles these days as a consequence of the 100ml limit. In many ways, it would be much better to allow larger normal bottles.

Perhaps most importantly, they need to get away from the rigid list based approach and train the staff properly as to what they’re looking for and why they’re looking for it. My cake wasn’t on the list and yet it’s something that really should have been checked: that it wasn’t tells me that we’re just fooling ourselves that longer lists for the security people means better security.

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