French fluency: it's only going to cost £8,171 or is it?

This blog is about family travel around the world without leaving the UK. We do this in a bid to be less polluting and tackle climate change while at the same time keeping a global outlook. Learning to speak a language fluently (or even a few words) is a wonderful way to get to know the world better. This blog looks at the costs - apparently Indonesian is the cheapest to learn, and Korean the most expensive. Words from Nicola Baird (see www.nicolabaird.com for more info about my books and blogs).

My Bangladeshi born neighbours cooked this for my family to celebrate the end
of Ramadan. Isn't that lovely? Eid mubarak to all who've been fasting. Understanding
each other isn't just about words - it's also sharing food and, in our case, cutting our hedge!

Today my brother texted to say he's 50 per cent fluent at French according to Duolingo (an app on his phone).  I'm a bit jealous as I'm still  only 44% fluent! So I was interested to see that you can work out exactly how much it costs to learn a new language.  This post contains info from a press release promoting Voucherbox.co.uk

The guide for travellers seeking to pick up a new language reveals that Indonesian is the cheapest tongue to master while Korean will set you back the most cash. Apparently French will cost me £8,171. I reckon it's going to be more expensive for me than it is for my clever younger brother!

	Language	Difficulty (Hours)	Ave cost per hour	Overall cost to fluency
1	Indonesian	900	£6.35	£5,715
2	Portuguese	600	£10.23	£6,138
3	Spanish	600	£10.26	£6,157
4	Swedish	600	£10.32	£6,191
5	Romanian	600	£10.83	£6,500
6	Urdu	1100	£6.24	£6,864
7	Italian	600	£11.67	£7,004
8	Hindi	1100	£6.79	£7,466
9	Danish	600	£12.47	£7,484
10	French	600	£13.62	£8,171
11	Persian (Dari, Farsi, Tajik)	1100	£7.50	£8,250
12	Polish	1100	£9.03	£9,932
13	Serbian	1100	£9.85	£10,834
14	Greek	1100	£10.18	£11,195
15	Dutch	600	£18.71	£11,224
16	Russian	1100	£10.31	£11,338
17	Croatian	1100	£10.51	£11,556
18	Latvian	1100	£10.51	£11,556
19	German	750	£16.02	£12,013
20	Bulgarian	1100	£11.82	£12,999
21	Czech	1100	£11.82	£12,999
22	*Thai	1100	£12.80	£14,082
23	Hebrew	1100	£14.44	£15,886
24	Arabic	2200	£8.89	£19,548
25	Turkish	1100	£18.27	£20,097
26	Japanese	2200	£11.08	£24,375
27	Mandarin (Chinese)	2200	£13.35	£29,367
28	Korean	2200	£18.71	£41,155

"Money saving gurus at Voucherbox.co.uk looked into the costs and the number of hours it takes for English speakers to start from scratch learning a new language and go all the way through to fluency.

The data was compiled using the average prices from a cost-per-hour language learning website, and calculated the estimated expenses of learning 28 languages from around the world.

As well as the cost per hour, the research also looked into the difficulty of learning each language – with average hours needed ranging from 600 to a staggering 2,200.

The 28 languages were picked from around the world and included European languages such as Spanish, Italian and French, as well as the more exotic languages such as Persian, Mandarin and Thai.

The results showed that although Indonesian took longer than more basic languages to learn, with around 900 hours needed from start to finish, it had the cheaper average hourly rate of tuition of £6.35, meaning the cost was particularly low.

Coming in at second place in the cheaper languages was Portuguese, with a total cost of £6,138. This differed to Indonesian as although the hourly price is a costly £10.23, only 600 hours are needed to speak fluently.

This was then followed by Spanish with a total costing of £6,157. This included 600 hours of language priced at £10.26 per hour.

In terms of typical school-taught languages within the UK, it’s those who study German compared to French that should be pleasantly surprised. Within the research, it was revealed that students on German courses at school could be saving £12,013 in money compared to just £8,171 if they had chosen to learn French.

Tipping the costly end of the scale as the more expensive languages to study included Korean, Mandarin and Japanese.

To learn Korean, you must set aside a whopping £41,155, as well as dedicating 2,200 hours to the language. It was revealed that as well as being one of the most difficult languages to crack, it will also cost £18.71 per hour.

Mandarin, or Chinese, will set you back a total of £29,367, while Japanese is also expensive, priced at an average of £24,375."

Over to you?
So if money is the only object - what language would you like to learn?!

I wish someone would bring me chocolate

This blog is about family travel around the world without leaving the UK. Impossible? No. Here I have a look at chocolate.... Words from Nicola Baird (see www.nicolabaird.com for more info about my books and blogs). I also publish an interview every week with people who live or work in Islington at islingtonfacesblog.com - there's a prize for the 100th follower.

This is Austrian chocolate - marzipan swirls covered in
chocolate, and utterly delicious. This was a gift
from friends.

I eat chocolate every day. And I intend to continue to do so.

My morning cup of coffee is perfected by a chunk of chocolate.

At university my chocolate life was even better - whenever I studied at our otherwise rather horrible student house, the scent of cooking chocolate from the factories inYork helped (maybe hindered) the synapses.

How to get it
More than 3 million tonnes of cocoa beans are harvested each year - growing in countries not far from the Equator (top producer is the Ivory Coast, then Indonesia, coming in at number 10 is Peru claims wikipedia). No surprise then that between December and Easter I can usually rely on having a stash of chocolate – thanks to Christmas gifts,  and then Valentine’s Day, my birthday and mother’s day. (Seeing as Valentine's Day is coming up I thought I better make an appeal...)

And from April to December I'd face a hungry gap if I didn’t supplement my supplies by chocolate buying missions at the local corner shop.

Loving chocolate is a habit I’ve passed on to my daughters. Indeed for my eldest’s 13^th birthday we booked a free tour around the unique chocolate factory in Adelaide. Haigh’s Chocolates is really well known in Australia, but not available overseas, unless you have an Ozzie pal visiting.

Chocolate lovers don't have to leave the country (indeed the point of this blog is that we rarely do leave) because in the UK there are plenty of chocolatier opportunities: Cadbury World’s claim to fame is that it is one of the UK’s most popular tourist attractions. And then there’s the Roald Dahl museum which sells dreamy hot chocolate at Cafe Twit, and reminds the family about the classic story Charlie & theChocolate Factory. This book has now been reborn as a musical in London’s West End.

And there are also tours - and kids parties - at the Land of the Yorkie bar, York here.

Raw ingredients
Finding a ripe yellow podded cocoa bean is definitely tricky in London, but you can have fun doing a different sort of chocolate hunt by looking at chocolate bars to try and work out where the company sourced their cocoa beans. See if you can find the Fair Trade logo too, that way if you do make a purchase you’ll know that the person who grew those beans got a fair price for their hard work.

• Places to visit for your own DIY chocolate tour: 1)York and Birmingham. 2) Any shop shelf displaying chocolate. 3) And in my house my secret chocolate stash (the one that if anyone hears me rifling through allows me to deny everything, because "I eat like a bird")...

Over to you
What's your favourite chocolate - other than the one in your hand?

Living history at Ironbridge

This blog is about family travel around the world without leaving the UK. Impossible? No. This post takes a look at the joys of visiting the birthplace of the industrial revolution and wondering what it must have been like in its heyday... was Ironbridge the sort of hell some unregulated resource hotspots seem to be now - say when making mobile phones on Indonesia's Bangka island?  Words from Nicola Baird (see www.nicolabaird.com for more info about my books and blogs).

It's rare that I make a long car journey with my family, mostly because taking a train is far more comfortable. However in August we decided to drive from London for a fortnight in Wales so hired a car which would allow us to make a detour. For kids who don't use cars much a pitstop at a motorway service station can be a highlight, so what we needed was a place to stretch our legs.

Ironbridge was the obvious candidate for a cultural stop-off too. It's the birthplace of industrial history - a fact I kept sharing with my passengers as we turned in the direction of another brown tourist sign that led us to Ironbridge from the M54. 

To begin with the kids, dog and my partner all seemed underwhelmed by the prospect of visiting an iron bridge (this is a very literally named location but it was built in 1779 so should be forgiven for that!). 

However when my family saw that Ironbridge is set in a beautiful gorge the mood changed. There are 10 museums to visit, and most are open every day from 10am-5pm. Some are free although the family pass offers 12 months of visits and on our short stop-over we didn't need to pay for anything, other than the snacks we picked up. 

Best of all the area offers a real sense of Victorian working history - not just the bosses, but also the workers involved. This honest interpretation is clearly liked by visitors - recently Tripadvisor rated Ironbridge as a better place to visit that the Pyramids in Egypt. It's also rated one of the top UNESCO sites in the world (ie, in a beauty/historic battle against Macchu Pichu, Peru and the Great Wall of China). See UNESCO's info here.

What I liked after hours of motorway driving was the serenity... yet in it's hey day Ironbridge and the surrounding area was simply hell. This is partly explained by a journalist writing for The Daily Telegraph, see the link here:

The gorge contains a four-mile stretch of the River Severn, flowing south from the Welsh mountains to the Bristol Channel. There has been iron-making there for centuries: what put it on the map and – arguably – fuelled the industrial revolution was mass production. In 1709 a Bristol Quaker, Abraham Darby, began smelting with coke from the Shropshire coalfield instead of woodland charcoal. His Coalbrookdale Ironworks churned out the raw material that would underpin everything from railways to steam power. The gorge glowed with industry 24 hours a day like a vision of hell. Darby’s grandson built the elegant, single-span, cast-iron bridge itself in 1779.

It made us all think about how industry has been cleaned up - at least in most of the UK. Yet for some workers conditions remain life-threatening and environmentally destructive. For instance the business of mining for the materials needed to make smartphones devastates parts of the coast and farm land on the Indonesian island of Bangka. 

In the end we walked over the iron bridge and took the dog for a run along one of the many footpaths that follow old railway routes (it helps that the area is so well signposted, see pic above). We also sped around a tiny  museum (free) and then stocked up on pies and coffee. I could have stayed for several days, and indeed plan to return as there's a huge amount to explore at the Blists Hill Victorian Museums, Ironbridge Museums and Coalbrookdales Museums sites. 

Best of all it's a very car-free friendly location - with free park and ride well signposted.

Find out more at www.ironbridge.org.uk including the special evening events and Christmas weekends (16-17 November 2013).

For updates about Friends of the Earth's make it better campaign, see http://www.foe.co.uk/what_we_do/make_it_better_about_37804.html