Martin & Marseille

The title gives a hint: I'll post some pictures today.


This is my École. You can see the names it's had, the current name (École Centrale Marseille) isn't there yet. You can nearly see all of my school on this picture - it's not big.



My room. Not much larger than my room in Germany, but without the 100MBit internet connection (without any connection, in fact - phone, net... it's got water and electricity, though).



The kitchen's bloody useless. We only managed to do this dinner in the kitchen because that was when most of the rooms were still empty.



Mesdames, Messieurs, je vous presente: Marseille.



Marseille's got a lot of nature. This is in the Calanques.



The Camargues is a nature park thingy, consists mainly of swamps but is very close to the sea. Apparently there's wild horses there, but we only saw flamingos.



It's not impossible to have fun in the residence, but pretty difficult. If it's not the annoying night-watchman's shift and we dismantle our rooms to improvise a table, and the guy at the end of the corridor isn't in we can even have real feasts.



The Traversee Vieux-Port. This boat made entirely of rubbish actually won the 1st prize in the category 'speed' (this is actually true). We got free tickets for 'Le diable s'habille en Prada', so I guess we should have gone for 'style' or 'creativity'. The overall winner actually got a weekend to Lapland.

I've been thinking about the French language a bit recently and I've come to the conclusion that if I'd analyse it using engineering logic the French language would be less useful than German would be.

Let me elaborate. First of all, here's my statement: When switching from French to German, you gain somewhere around 1dB comparing signal to noise ratios (SNR).

My apologies to all you non-engineers. I will try and explain everything in a comprehensible way, however it's not always that easy as I will be using engineering logic to prove my statement.
To understand the statement, imagine talking to someone with loads of background noise, e.g. using a bad phone line or in a very loud environment. Imagine the noise level isn't so high that it actually hurts and for the sake of the argument never will. I will arbitrarily define the SNR to be equal to 0dB when to noise level is so high you can just about understand the other one. If a language is more suitable for this kind of situation, you might be able to increase the noise level a little bit (or decrease the voice level). If you can actually double the noise level when switching from one language to another, you have a gain of 3dB on your SNR (if you can increase it by a factor 10, you gain 10dB and so on - the scale is logarithmic). 1dB means you can increase the noise by about 25%, but of course all of this is very, very hypothetical and of course in no way accurate.

Short version: I think german speakers have less trouble understanding what they're saying. (Note: this only applies for spoken language, not for written language, unless you have to use an AZERTY keyboard to write it).

Of course, I prefer my mother tongue, so at first I thought I wasn't really in the position to write this and any French person would think it was the other way round. Now, I'm not so sure. Here's a couple of reasons I think I'm right:

Too many similarities - My favourite example here is marron (brown) and marrant (funny, as in 'hey, that's funny'). For the untrained ear, those two words are hardly distinguishable. Anyone who know's some French can hear the difference if they're said after another, but actually pronouncing them right is extremely difficult, at least for me. Doesn't matter (so I'm told) because the French use context to distinguish the two - which can be confusing. In this case, both words are adjectives, so they have the same position in the sentence. I's easy to think of examples ('Mr. Jones? Oh, he lives over there, it's the house with the funny door.').

Heavy reliance on proper pronounciation - Of couse, this is the most annoying for foreigners, but I've heard people with accents having similar problems. It's happened several times to me that I said a - grammatically - perfectly right sentence and the other end had no clue what I was talking about - bad pronounciation. It's hard to get right, because the difference between an accent and bad pronounciation is a lot smaller than in German (I think). This also goes for questions: In French, you can quite often make a question from a statement by increasing the pitch of your voice at the end of the sentence. Today, I left an office saying 'Ah bon, c'est tout' which must have been pretty close to 'C'est tout?' because the secretary said 'Oui, c'est tout'.

Big difference between pronounciation and written words - Yes, I know German has a big difference here too, every language has. German has an advantage, though: We usually pronounce every letter in the word, exceptions usually being non-German based. And we leave a gap between the words, making them easier to distinguish. When talking to foreigners in Germany, I'm used to questions like: 'What was that word?' whereas here, I'm more interested in the whole sentence, simply because I can't tell where one word started and the other stopped.

Bad use of redundance - In language, redundance is what let's you understand a sentence even if you missed out a couple of syllables. French has some redundancys which are not really necessary. It starts with their tenses. Everyone tells me passé simple is not really important, but of course it's used in books. Grammatically, it has the same meaning as the passé composé (but is not made using a modal and a participle, just in case your interested, but has it's own forms) and in some cases, I've heard people use it as a shortcut in spoken language (e.g. saying j'eus [I had] instead of j'ai eu. Now I see this written down, I think I might have been malinformed about this - if you mumble the second one, it sounds like the first one).
Another thing is the adaption of adjectives. If I'd use an AZERTY keyboard for too long, I'd have to say 'Je serai fou' (I'm getting crazy). Unless, of course, I'm a girl (check.... no, I'm not) in which case I'd have to say 'je serai folle'. This adds zero information to the sentence, in 99% of the cases I hopefully don't have to adapt the adjective to clarify my sex (that's why I've grown a beard).

Problems with new words - A good example of new words is family names. Here, everyone just spells out their last name automatically, because just by hearing the sound you usually have no clue on how to spell something.



I might add some more to this entry in the future, but right now I've got french class. Time to adapt the filter matching in my acoustic signal processing lobe.



[Update]

This kind of supports my analysis: http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/79712/from/rss09

So I see this poster hanging up: Week-end d'Integration. Everone here calls it WEI (rhymes with hawaii). I thought it would be a nice opportunity to do nice stuff and meet new people.

It taught me something about french culture.

This is what I figured out: We'd be going to a place near Toulon, a camp site like thing with caravan-bungalows and there'd be loads of activities. Everyone from the EGIM was invited, about 200-300 students were expected. Well, that was the official description. The real one is a bit different:

First of all, the main objective of the WEI is to drink as much as possible. Drinks are included in the fee, so you can just get wasted. I just didn't realise how crazy my fellow students could actually be.
It all started on the bus. There was loads of alcohol and french chants (of which I didn't understand anything) and I felt like I was on the wrong bus. Everyone just got a lot louder once we got there, and the main group (who had the left in the morning and had been there all day) already had shrunken by 3 or 4 people who'd had too much to drink. No worries - the Croix Rouge had patrols all the time for us and kept carrying people away. The medics and the camp site staff seemed used to this kind of trip, so consider that normal.

Having food was not what I expected, either. I enjoy a nice meal without lots of racket and a little chat with the rest sitting at my table. I recorded 90 secs of dinner for you, but I didn't get any really wild bits (e.g. when some of the students got naked and jumped around on the table). This video was taken during the main course, it got a lot louder when noone had anything to eat. Imagine sitting in a football stadium, that gets close to the noise level.



The days were quite relaxing, I talked to loads of people, played Petanque and the French version of Mafia, called Loup-Garou (a word I'd learned reading Harry Potter in French). The BDE (bureau des élèves), who had organised everything, had really done lots of work and had organised a foam party, we had a disco for ourselves every night, loads of games...

By the way, being German can be an advantage, because you can sing along to Rammstein songs without an accent, which is considered quite cool by some.

What did I learn?
French students like to party really hard, they don't miss an opportunity to get naked, most activities are organised mainly for the official programme and I also learned a couple of French words I don't want to repeat here.
And I never enjoyed a peaceful meal as much as I did after the WEI.

So if you ever get the opportunity... don't miss it out!

The title's really just to get some attention. I really like France in general and Marseille in particular. However, there are - of course - some things that might theoretically drive a german student nuts. Just talking in theory, though

I've compiled a small list:

• French bureaucracy is just incredible and makes me feel like doing some stuff at the Stadtverwaltung Germersheim to relax. A lot of you might know the film Asterix erobert Rom (sorry, only know the german title) where Asterix has to get form A39. Just to remind you: Asterix is originally french, meaning the author didn't have to exaggerate much. The difference is that in the Asterix movie, everything was in the same building, here you have to dash across town and others even have to go to Aix-En-Provence for some of their paperwork. I'm not mentioning any of the trouble the non-EU-students have to go through.


• French driving is just generally a minimisation of used space on streets. Here, leaving more than 10cm between cars is considered a waste. For the first time in my life I was actually stuck in a traffic jam - with my bike! I couldn't move for at least 5 minutes. Same goes for parking (that's what the pavements are there for). A famous quote about french driving goes something like this: 'Traffic in France is just a matter of vocabulary', although I believe it's a lot worse in Paris than here (so I've been told).


• Standing at the till in supermarkets. All of a sudden, the same person who was wildly honking his horn at everyone in the same district will calmly load his stuff into plastic bags, chat with the person at the till, think a couple of minutes about how he's going to pay, decide to use Carte Bleu if he's in a hurry or Cheques if the next person in the queue is, fill out the check slowly and double check it was right (although the tills have printers for checks), say goodbye to everyone and then pack the rest of his stuff.


• The way there's always loads of food and half of it get's chucked away. Would anyone enlighten me if it's good manners to leave food on your plate or just habit?


• AZERTY keyboards


• The little liberty École-Students have. I'll write an entry about that sometime later.


• The fact that as soon as someone knows I'm german, he or she'll start quoting random phrases they remeber from their german classes ('Guten Tag! Gesundheit! Ich liebe Schokolade! Jawohl Herr General! Heute hat es geregnet!' - never omitting the exlamation marks'). Don't mix this up with french people who just want to have a chat in German to brush it up - I like that, especially as those kind of people are more likely to correct me when I'm doing mistakes.


• The bread. It goes stale after 12hrs and doesn't fill you up in the first place.

I'm not doing a list of stuff I like, though - it would be too much. Southern France is great!