121–130 of 135 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be fair cheques are still popular in France and regularly used by administration, landlords and individuals.
To be fair cheques are also popular in the US. Until recently I had to pay my rent with Cheque. I live in an apartment complex in San Francisco.
I have one of those.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What to say about the US (and Canada) where cheap transfers between bank accounts don't exist (at least from individual to individual) Yes, where it exists it's rarely instantaneous across banks
Sure they do, in Canada anyway. Interac email transfer is quick and painless, although it costs a dollar or so.
I'm talking about giving someone your bank/branch/acc number and send them a payment.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fellow french here. I left France last year officially to finish my studies, unofficially to launch my startup. Where? In Estonia: - 250€ for the rent in a shared flat, everything included (winter time, so more 200€ the rest of the year) 10min by feet from the city center, in the most vibrant district. - Free public transportation (but Tallinn being a human-sized city, it doesn't really matter). - I incorporated and…
How does healthcare work there?
If you want more informations regarding the tax system: http://www.investinestonia.com/en/investment-guide/tax-syste...
Maybe France really changed a lot. But be not mistaken: It is still the most bureaucratic country on earth. Anecdote: I'm doing a PhD in France. Each year, one has to do a re-inscription. In Germany, that means sending money to the university. In France, that means sending in – let me count, I have them on my desk – 17 documents, and to pay as well of course (preferred way: with a check. Like it is 50 years ago). The…
You have the right answer sadly... It's just impossible to grasp the stupid amount of paperwork you have to fill for everything. As an example I needed more paperwork for my train rail-card than my passport (this is not a joke, it was really the case). In the UK, I just give a 10 pound note and I have my oyster card, no questions asked. My brother has a small business, it's just impossible to understand what the admi…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's with the bashing of languages excluding English & countries that are not part of the English speaking world as of late on HN? It's getting annoying and bordering on obnoxious chauvinistic & ethnocentric rhetoric. Not the prettiest nor easiest one to learn either. What makes you think that English is any better? Actually and this is an objective assessment English is one of the hardest languages to learn at lea…
French here. I do believe that English is very easy to learn, because not really error prone. Do you conjugate verbs? No (well, kind of). Do the English nouns have genders? No. It's true that English is not straight forward to pronounce, but that's pretty much the only difficulty of the language. On the other hand, I would say that French is very error prone: it's like Spanish or Italian (in the sense that you need t…
- Do you conjugate verbs?
Sure you do in English and there are also the irregular verbs problem to crack such as go went gone / read read read (As you know, the past and past participle are pronounced as the word "red" and there's no clear non-ambiguous rule governing this usage you just have to memorize it sucks big time, doesn't it?)
- IMO, gender-based languages make much more sense to me and genderless langs like English are very confusing and suffixing every noun with -o or -a is not really a huge investment to take to avoid this confusion.
- I acknowledged that French is a bit more difficult to master than other Romance languages like Spanish and Italian and it takes much more effort to write or read but it still if you get around the rules in French and get familiar with the sounds, it would be far easier to guess words pronunciation or spelling without looking up a dictionary compared to English.
By the way English still retains some of the influences of the French language as a result of the Norman Invasion of England such as the subjunctive mood where you need to pick the right tense to express doubt in your communication. It's also worth mentioning that some people would argue that the complexity and tediousness in English spelling is attributable to adopting French words into the lexicon but seriously I don't care not my problem.
So, I would disagree with you that English is a simple or an easy to learn language. On the contrary, it's a life long investment and very high maintenance not only for the most complicated parts such as idioms or poetry but for the most basic ones such as reading and writing.
I'd be compelled to add that even Arabic and despite all the negative publicity it gets for being a complicated language which in some aspects it pretty much is, it still has a more streamlined and straightforward process than in English to reading and writing once you get your head around the concept of weak and strong vowels to start reading and writing and there's no need to memorize words one by one to be able to speak properly.
Lastly, the nerve of him calling a Romance language not pretty. I might not favor French over Italian or Portuguese when it comes to the domain of musical sounds but it's definitely way way better than English in that regard.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's with the bashing of languages excluding English & countries that are not part of the English speaking world as of late on HN? It's getting annoying and bordering on obnoxious chauvinistic & ethnocentric rhetoric. Not the prettiest nor easiest one to learn either. What makes you think that English is any better? Actually and this is an objective assessment English is one of the hardest languages to learn at lea…
French here. I do believe that English is very easy to learn, because not really error prone. Do you conjugate verbs? No (well, kind of). Do the English nouns have genders? No. It's true that English is not straight forward to pronounce, but that's pretty much the only difficulty of the language. On the other hand, I would say that French is very error prone: it's like Spanish or Italian (in the sense that you need t…
As a native English speaker who has studied Spanish and French (though I've neglected both for far too long to do much with them now), the spelling of French compared to its pronunciation my be less regular than Italian or Spanish (going from pronunciation to spelling can be error-prone for unfamiliar words, but going from spelling to pronunciation usually isn't), but compared to English it is a model of simplicity.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
With a few exceptions, French employers are not the problem, they do pay the same price for you as in other European countries, more or less ! The difference is that your average engineer in France costs them around 1.5-2.5 times the total take home pay, because of high, compulsory labor taxes. In exchange, employees get as standard : * a top notch, virtually free healthcare system with no concept of exclusions or "p…
This a million times. Tech entrepreneurship works in the US and fails in other states because we're in this sweet spot of low taxes and low corruption, with high levels of education and easy access to a large and powerful economy. Euro states have most of the above, but the high taxation and labor protections strangles little shops and scares investors (would you invest in a French startup? I wouldn't). Corrupt autoc…
America loves the new and shiny. In particular, the culture in CA is more than open to new ideas, often actively seeking newness. And I think that is at the root of the difference.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You should read the introduction of this article about this "mere curiosity". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_language
290,000,000 speakers (including secondary speakers.) out of 7,000,000 people on the planet. 4% of the planet. If 4% of America spoke a language, most of us wouldn't be in much of a rush to localize. Fortunately for French, the core native speakers in France are rich, and most of the planet is still poor. As the rest of the planet catches up, "curiosity" becomes more accurate over time.
You're implicitly assuming that the remaining 96% of the population is speaking another language which is untrue in your analogy as the world population speaks more than one language and the largest one in terms of number of speakers goes to Mandarin with around 15% of world population.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
French here. I do believe that English is very easy to learn, because not really error prone. Do you conjugate verbs? No (well, kind of). Do the English nouns have genders? No. It's true that English is not straight forward to pronounce, but that's pretty much the only difficulty of the language. On the other hand, I would say that French is very error prone: it's like Spanish or Italian (in the sense that you need t…
> and the spelling of the words is very complicated, for example the sound 'o' can be spelled 'o', 'au', 'eau', 'ô'. As a native English speaker who has studied Spanish and French (though I've neglected both for far too long to do much with them now), the spelling of French compared to its pronunciation my be less regular than Italian or Spanish (going from pronunciation to spelling can be error-prone for unfamiliar…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Our startup was created in France 2,5 years ago. Here is our experience: Some of us started working on the project while getting unemployment benefits (huge boost). We get (very) affordable office spaces from the city and various incubators (we are located in Paris). We are able to live on first customers + 0% loans from the state + hundreds of thousands of euros in various grants for innovation ( http://www.bpifranc…
"Why would we want to start run company anywhere else?" Rent? And living expenses in general. It's going to be you largest expense bootstrapping, especially since it's post tax. It also gets harder to invite people you know to come work with you and getting a larger/better suited apartment in general (location, contract terns, layout, furnished etc). Not that this is that different from other big cities and I persona…
Frankly, if you are an early stage startup with young people Paris is not the cheapest, but you have access to everything: public transportation is free if you are officially unemployed and living with roommates can make everything much cheaper!