Friday 31 May 2013

Learning French

I've been learning French for quite some time now and I have come to a point where a typical French course doesn't really bring me any further. Yes, I can study and pass the tests, but about a month later I will have forgotten the majority of the vocabulary again and the grammar will not come as easily as I thought it would.

I'm trying various things to improve this rather sad affair with a plethora of approaches. If someone else has got any other good ideas, please feel free to use the commentary section below.

Currently, to improve my ability to talk about my specialist field (i.e. chemistry), I have been 1) reading French chemical literature (if you do not have access to it, it is rather hard to come by I am afraid) 2) Reading chemistry articles in English and explain to the world in general what is going on in the article... in French. 3) Practise presentations that I have given at some point in my life, but in French.

So far this is going well, as I learn topic-related vocabulary all the time, because I have to. With general broad French that is a problem, because I do not feel the need to look up words. If I talk about a general topic to myself, I tend to go around in circles only using the words I know without learning anything new. The problem here is that they are not new topics that I think of and I have re-visited them on occasion before.

The solution I came up with so far, is 1) read French novels and newspapers. This is for passive understanding. Unfortunately, the passive vocabulary does not readily enter my active one. As a consequence there is 2) reading articles and newspapers in English or German and again tell myself, what has been happening in these articles. In addition, there is 3) finding topics that will come up again and again, such as talking about my CV in an interview or describing one's personality and write the answers out in English. Once that is done, I do not translate word for word, but note down the words that I don't know and remember them. Afterwards, I talk about the topics I prepared.

Improving listening comprehension is the easiest one. My wife and I own several DVD box sets of TV series. Many of them have a French audio channel et voilĂ , practising listening comprehension has become easier.

As a consequence, I speak, listen or read French almost every single minute on my own and I get the feeling that it is improving, although I must say it is quite a lot of effort. Of course, there is also the chance to go to places where they speak French, but unfortunately these chances are few and far in between. At best, I find them to be add-ons to the core rather than a part of it, which is a pity as a language is supposed to be spoken in an interactive setting. My experience with other foreign languages has taught me, however, that speaking it in such a situation comes with confidence. I guess all I am currently doing is boosting my confidence, so that I am ready once a "real" situation rolls round.

Tuesday 28 May 2013

Becoming a Reader

Well written novels are a joy to read. What I recently found out is, that well written novels are a joy to read "out loud", as well. But let's start at the beginning.

My wife suffers from travelling sickness, i.e. whenever she is in a moving vehicle as a passenger for a certain while and in her case can see outside, she starts to feel queasy in the stomach and may even be sick. How long this takes depends on the circumstances. Generally, jerky driving style and crowdedness catalyse the process, one might say. The strongest catalyst of them all, however, is reading or watching something, like a film or so. Thus, she is condemned to just stand there and wait while wondering when she will be sick.

Making matters worse, she has to take the bus on several mornings per week to get to work... in rush hour. The procedure is always the same. Bus is never on time. One generally arrives when three or four should have been there already. Consequence many people, traffic jams, you get the idea. Obviously this is not very pleasant as you might imagine.

So I had an idea. You probably have guessed it by now. I own a headset, there are several recording programs out there. Some free of charge. My mp3 player is hardly in use nowadays. Therefore, I decided to record myself while reading a book out loud and put it on the mp3 player for her to listen to.

I started out with a short book that she liked, Franz Kafka's "The Metamorphosis". When I read this book, I was not used to recording myself and I was quite shy in the process. The result is a very monotonous drone of my voice. Maybe it also had something to do with the fact that I didn't like the book much, I don't know.

As the second book, I chose Terry Pratchett's "Mort" and now that I have gone past the weirdness of hearing my own voice recorded, I am really starting to enjoy it. Anyone who knows the book can now try to imagine the voice he would give Death. I think after another couple of sessions, I will need to change my vocal chords ;). The Klatchians fell victim to my bad Indian accent as I have no Arab one in my repertoire.
My main problem at the moment still is to a) remember what voice I have given to characters that do not appear often and b) find the right tone of voice. Very often it happens that I say something with a booming voice only to follow it up with a  "mumbled Mort."

She loves it, though, so I can still improve my little charade. It's fun while it lasts. I wonder what other books I will read for her... 

Friday 24 May 2013

Contributing to Mozilla

I guess, it's time now to talk about an activity that I have been doing for quite some time. Since almost a year, I am a contributor to Mozilla's Automated Testing Team. I've been learning all this stuff about Python programming, but I didn't find a real way to use it properly. Anyone who followed my blog (I doubt there is such a person as I am not actively promoting it) will know that I had a couple of semi-useless projects on the go, but these all died down for one reason or another.

In the end, I became aware that Mozilla is an Open Source project and aside from the core developers who are employed full-time, anyone is invited to join. I was quite sceptical at first, but once I figured out how to use IRC, I was ready to go (Now it feels odd to think that at one point I didn't know how to ;) ).

For anyone who is willing to improve his skills and is not afraid to be thrown in at the deep end, it is a truly awesome experience! From day one, I was welcomed and everyone had a lot of patience. There are a lot of online resources and when you're completely stuck, you can always go and speak to someone on the IRC channels. I first made my way through Bugs Ahoy! until I figured out how to use Bugzilla and at some point, I was shoved towards various sites on Github to help out on there.

Because it is such a big project not only entailing Firefox and Thunderbird, but several other aspects, as well, there is quite a variety of programming languages being used such as JavaScript, Python, HTML/CSS, Java, or C++. So if you really want to learn something new, there is a lot of opportunities to practice it within the community, as well.

All in all, I am glad I took the step and got involved. There is no pressure and everyone can contribute as much or as little as they want. I am quite proud to say that I have contributed quite a few lines of code to mozdownload and I had a blast doing it!