Martinisms

Sorry to use my otherwise more "cultural" blog for this kind of anti-advertisement. But I just need to put this somewhere...
OK, I must admit Ryanair has served me well so far. They serve Karlsruhe-Baden airport, which is really close to me and my parents, Marseilles and Stansted, all very useful. It's usually not too difficult to get decent prices for flights, even if this encourages people to be very un-ecological. So me and many people put up with a lot of stupid Ryanair regulations, which usually include paying for every single step you want to take extra (I'm surprised the toilets don't have a slot for coins, but that's probably international flight regulations). So, OK, I'm quite glad they're around - but if you want my advice: Don't buy Ryanair gift vouchers.

I like buying and booking online. You can do it anytime and it's usually fast and easy. However, I nearly bought a ticket without using the gift voucher I got for Christmas - because there's no place to enter gift voucher details.
This puzzled me, so I had a look on the voucher itself: To use it, you have to ring the Ryanair hotline - not quite an 0800 number. However, I tried - busy. Same the next couple of times. I decided to get the Germany and England hotline numbers too and ring them with my international phone card any time I see a phone box.

About one week later, I finally got through the first time. At the time, I was on a road trip with some friends so the only possibility was to use my mobile phone which uses prepaid credit. I had everything prepared, credit card, voucher code, flight details. The phone call took quite a while, and I wasn't exactly getting the impression the operator was trying to go full speed. When I finally got to where she was dictating me my confirmation code, my phone cut me off - no more credit. I had about 5€ left on my phone before that call. I immediately tried again with a friends phone, but - busy. I managed to check my emails that night and as I didn't have a confirmation e-mail, I assumed my reservation had been cancelled (which it had).

The next couple of days, I tried 3-4 times a day to ring them again, even though it was my holiday trip week. After that, my call frequency went down quite a lot, partly because my life doesn't really revolve around ringing expensive Ryanair hotlines. I once forgot to ring 2 days in row, imagine that.
About 2 weeks after my first call, I got through for the second time. I restarted the booking procedure, but found out my gift voucher had been blocked from the first time round. I explained why and the operator said she'd try and fix it and that I should call back in about 15 minutes, which was when my next class was about to start.
By this time the price for the flight had already increased by 8€, so I decided to come late for class. I called up again, and, surprisingly, got through pretty soon. I had 5€ left on my phone and tried to speed up the booking process by lying when possible. The dreaded warning sound that my credit was running out came up when the process was already quite far and my phone hung up on me exactly after the last letter of my confirmation code. The operator showed some common sense by not cancelling the flight this time - the confirmation code is not really necessary IMHO anyway as you get an email with your flight details. But hey, the flight was mine.

Summary:

Value of gift voucher: 25€
Amount of money I spent on calls: 15€
Increase in price during the procedure: 8€
Amount of money I actually gained: 2€
Time spent on my behalf: 1-2h on ringing tries during 4 weeks (imagine the time it costs to pay an engineer for 2hrs compared to 2€)
Annoyance this caused: priceless

Seems I'll be leaving France quite soon. I should be signing my contract for an internship right now, but I can't find a printer that actually works anywhere here. So for those who aren't just here to read stuff about France: Starting April 2nd I'll be working in Munich for Rohde & Schwarz for 5 months before going back to Karlsruhe to finally finish my degree.

I suppose this might confuse some people: yes, the plan was definitely to stay in France for a internship as well. Starting last year, I applied to a couple of jobs in France but got refused on all of them. I decided to apply in Germany too, as a backup. The job offer I got from this company in Munich was really very good so I went for it.

So in order to avoid any rumours: I could have found a decent job in France, maybe even Marseille, even decently paid. But I didn't look that hard. Call me lazy if you want. The other part of the truth is that even if I will be missing Marseille a lot I wanted to move around bit, too. Moving back to Germany wasn't exactly what I had in mind, but Munich is a cool city (I've been told) and I'd have trouble finding a job as good as this one.

So, I'll try to get some more articles on line before moving, and I might even continue afterwards (Bavaria is foreign enough for me... for a start, I can understand the people about as much as I can understand the Marseillais).

So, what's coming? Well, I won't promise anything, but I haven't really presented the city a lot so I'll try and show you ma ville. I've got some more ideas but I'm not going waste my precious little rest of time in front of my computer.

It is interesting to watch the development of my language skills (the French language skills, that is). Remember for me it's the first time I'm really learning a foreign language, English doesn't count and Latin doesn't really count, either.
Before I went everyone told me I'd pick it up in no time and I'd be fluent after a couple of weeks. I don't find it that easy.
For a start, I communicate too much with other foreigners (i.e. non-French) people. This is less avoidable than it seems: for a start, I live with more foreigners than natives and then I do lots of stuff over the internet. If I work on a computer project for a day on my own computer I usually don't see much French stuff. Even some projects for university require reading English papers. I probably do much more stuff in English when I'm in Germany but never noticed.
Then I don't do much active learning. My École does offer French for foreigners, but that's designed for 1st year students and clashes with my 3rd year timetable. 80% of my learning is just chatting with people and listening in classes, the rest is made up of reading (fiction, newspapers, some web sites) and only a very little bit of actual work on my grammar and vocab. I think this is not the best way to learn a language: It's difficult to remember which prepositions to use and which gender nouns have this way.
Nevertheless, I'm a lot better than I was. I can follow most of my lessons, even when the prof doesn't talk too clearly (most of it interpolated, but still). I read French books (nothing hard, so far only French translations of English books) and newspapers and get quite far using a dictionary. I have conversations and use the subjonctive just because everything else sounds wrong. I get asked for directions and can help.
But I still make loads of mistakes. This is what I find difficult.

- Pronunciation
Is not really that hard. Write me down a French word and don't rush me, I'll read it without a mistake 95% of the time. But French pronunciation is adaptive. It changes. That makes it difficult to apply it correctly the same time as constructing sentences. And it is very sensitive to mistakes. Little pronunciation mistakes can make words and sentences completely incomprehensible.

- Conjugation and tenses
German conjugation is weird and very irregular so I should be used to this. There's a difference, though: in the spoken language, German speakers usually only need the present form (Indikativ), the past perfect (Perfekt) which uses a participle and present forms of be (sein) and have (haben). Future forms are even easier: connect future forms of 'be' and 'have' with the infinitive or use the present in a future context. The famous Konjunktiv isn't really used that often so you can get quite far with forms like 'Ich würde gerne klettern' (I'd like to climb).
French conjugations like their own forms. For spoken language, you need to conjugate the participle (for passé composé, past tense), the imparfait (simple past), futur, conditionnel, of course présent and the subjonctif which all have their own conjugations. Then, you should know the futur composé which is a composite conjugation but uses go (aller) for a modal instead of have and be. For a higher language level you also could learn the subjonctif imparfait and for reading the passé simple is often used in books, but for an intermediate level understanding them is enough.
Point I'm trying to make: we Germans are getting a bit lazy and use modals too often, so this multitude of conjugations is confusing.

- Vocab
I'm pretty lazy learning vocab. It's just so boring... But as I never learnt lots of French at school, most of my vocab I just 'picked up'. Which means I don't know much, use it in wrong places and of course mix up the genders. What I try and do is remember whole phrases: "La coté obscure de la force..." not only gives me the genders of two nouns, but also helps because words on -é usually have the same gender - now I know it's feminine.

- Writing
My writing in general is pretty bad. I'm starting to get the hang of accents, but my biggest source of mistakes is the accordance of adjectives and participles. Take this sentence: 'FSO is very well developed.'. In French, that's 'FSO est trés evoluée.'. I usually forget the last e, because it's so far from the word FSO. And even so, FSO is an English abbreviation - so why is it feminine? Answer: because it's a technology, and it's 'la technologie'. I just hope I didn't do any mistakes in this paragraph.

- Style
Have you ever seen or hear someone create a phrase and you thought "Grammatically it's correct and I can't explain why, but it doesn't sound very good?" People tell me that loads here. Interesting: seems like a 'feel' for a language evolves in several stages. I wonder if I ever get to the one where I can choose the 'better' phrase from two grammatically equivalent ones.

Although my French gets better all the time, I know it won't be anywhere near perfection until March. 6 months is just not enough to learn a language at my age .

hi all,

happy new year. During my holidays in Germany I got a huge amount of positive feedback concerning my blog, and I want to thank everyone for their interest and also apologise that I haven't written anything for a while. I am quite busy, and practically all of my classes require computer work so I prefer to do something other then hacking away during my free time. However, especially having been home to Germany during the holidays I've come up with some new ideas for entries which will hopefully be available soon.

For those reading my blog on-line, some might have thought that the weather-plugin is buggy. It's not: since I got here I haven't had one day without sun and yesterday I did a nice hike from La Ciotat to Cassis along the Calanques, wearing nothing but a t-shirt and having some ice-cream afterwards. Incredible what a European summer can be like. As usual when I do something interesting, I forgot my camera, though.

There I am, riding to school on my bike on nice sunny morning and what do I see? I never found out
if it was a French mini-riot in an otherwise unhabitated and uninhibited area, a parking fine or
an attack by vicious fireflies, but I don't think this car is going to try and overtake me in a
roundabout.

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

I hope the title's right.

I'm not writing much today, but I'd like to share some music.

The first song's called In the waiting line by Zero 7. I've been listening to it quite a lot recently, mainly because I like the chorus: 'Everyone's saying different things to me, different things to me', or 'wasting my time in the waiting line'. That's how I feel when I try and do some admin stuff. It's on the 'Garden State' soundtrack or on the Zero 7 album 'Simple Things' if you're interested.

The next song is actually freely available on the internet, from the Stereo Total web site. It's called Carte Postale, the third song on that site. It's not exactly a description of what I'm doing, but it's pretty close: 'Je fais tout pour m'amuser'. Just change 'St Tropez' to 'Marseille', it still sort of rhymes.

There's one good thing about admin staff that's never available: You don't get a guilty conscience if you go the Calanques instead of running around offices. That's what I did yesterday, I think it was even exactly the same spot as on the picture in the wikipedia entry (follow the link).

Who knows, I might even get a tan. But now this entry is getting less realistic and I suppose it's better to stop.

The title says 'ERASMUS - a horrible chaos' in german with a french accent and is a quote from L'auberge espagnole, which I mentioned earlier. The paperwork I wanted to do (see topic before) will have to wait, because the chap I was going to meet isn't here, or maybe he's still in his lunchbreak. I don't know.

So I thought I'd write about what it feels like being a foreign student. A couple of you have made their own experiences, and I'd be quite interested to see if you felt the same way.

When I was in Germany, I was alwas slightly annoyed by the way foreign students kept to themselves, but I also like the way how groups of foreign students would often invite others around and let them participate in whatever foreign stuff they were doing (except the bunches of Spanish speaking students). Frankly, I always thought they were a bit lazy. I have to apologise.

When I moved in, I met a couple of english guys. I have done most of the stuff so far together with them, but we've never missed an opportunity to do something with some french people. I don't think that was a coincidence. I could have moved in anywhere, I would always have met other ERASMUS students and I would have teamed up with them. Why?

To start with, we're on the same side of the culture barrier (I claim the copyright for that word if it doesn't exist yet). My french is still only at slow small talk level, and if you do an ERASMUS year there's one thing you won't be having too much of: information. So what happens is, automatically, foreigners team up and tell each other everything, no matter how trivial - it might be useful to someone. And it's not only administrative stuff, it's also what I mean when I say culture barrier - stuff like how many degrees is the setting with the button on the right of the washing machine? Do yo give a tip? Where can you buy cheap food? Will UHT milk go off if you leave it in your room (I knew that one)?

The other thing is: you have no-one else to complain to. Complaining is good. It relieves. However, complaining is quite sophisticated language usage. The ERASMUS students you team up with will not only understand you, but also know what it's like and be sympathetic.

To be fair: most french students have been extremely nice, have taken us all over the place, we've been invited to dinner twice so far and so on. So don't worry, I still do a lot of French speaking and have been complimented on my grip on the language and my accent more than once (that last sentence was for my mum, really ).
Quite often, being a foreign student is a bonus, too: People might not remember my name, but they remember the german guy and many people just like to chat to someone from somewhere else to exchange opinions and stuff like that. Question #1, by the way, is: 'German beer is a lot better, isn't it?'

In case you're interested: it is. But what I really miss is german bread.