An attempt at internationalization
German
It’s been a while since I managed to bring myself to write something on my weblog. Recently, I’ve been busy learning German and I figured I could create more opportunities for myself to write in German by sharing my thoughts on the internet!
I recently finished my B1.1 course but haven’t had the chance to practice my German outside of it, in both writing and speaking. I get by just fine when it comes to listening, or at least I have the impression that I do, because I actively consume German media in various manners including the following.
- Reading/Watching the news and ads displayed on MVG
displays.
- Very informative on both general knowledge as well as local events, that’s how I got to know Theatiner Filmtheater and Muenchener Kammerspiele.
- (I need to find the name of the company producing them again) Those displays actually run GNU/Linux Debian, I think the eMMC storage fails occassionally which is why you end up seeing Debian initramfs running a busybox shell instead :D
- Listening to German bands and attending live concerts, lots of German in the background and the presenters usually give their speech in German too.
- Watching German theater plays at Kammerspiele with English subtitles.
- Watching English/French films with German subtitles (OmU) at the local cinemas.
- Watching German films with English subtitles (OmeU).
- Public TV channels such as Arte TV, ARD, ZDF.
- Taggeschau has a nice 15 minutes, twice a day podcast online for free.
- Bunch of Youtube channels on various topics! I might dump them here at some point.
- Reading nachrichtenleicht.
Darja
As I was reading Hugo documentation about internationalization, or rather “Multilingual mode”, I thought to myself, “why not Darja as well?”. I’ve been using my custom QWERTY-based layout which helps me with writing French, Darja and, recently, German for almost 10 years now. The whole point of such a layout was to be able to spread knowledge in Darja with the goal of normalizing talking about technical, political, psychological and cultural topics in it. I firmly believe that making it the official language of Algeria would improve the future of the people. They will be able to grasp way more concepts quite quickly without the mental struggle of eternally translating in one’s head.
Similarly to my lack of blogposting, I never managed to produce anything in Darja unfortunately but small steps should hopefully lead me to be more comfortable doing so. There is undoubtedly this cultural barrier which makes me uncomfortable writing my thoughts openly in it but that’s the first hurdle that I must tackle first I think.
French
Prior to moving to Munich, I spent around 3-4 years in France where I was speaking most of the time since my exposure to the English-speaking community was fairly limited. I somehow survived despite having relatively poor French, I must admit. One of my regrets was not taking up proper courses to become better at speaking French. Nowadays, I have very little need to exercise my French but I’m always excited to speak it every now and then :) I plan to work on my grammar by, hopefully, writing more blog posts in addition to expanding my vocabulary. I feel quite happy to be able to experience different things in different languages/cultures and the combination of French and German motivates me to keep at it.
Closing words
I will for the most part try to translate everything myself while relying on the dictionary and relevant tools to validate and look up idioms, different ways of expressing ideas in different languages… etc. Feel free to provide your feedback or perhaps become penpals to improve my German :)