I’ve always wanted to see France, but never had a chance to do so. Now this is about to change. And the timing isn’t too bad, either, as according to our curriculum we are about to deal with the French Revolution right after the summer break. So I can combine work with some personal fun. Some students of this class have already been on an exchange visit to Paris, and they were all thrilled by it.
I figured if I were to go to France, I’d better get some basic understanding of the French language. So I went to a bookstore and got myself a CD language course by Pons. I went home, took the textbook out and started reading and listing to the CD. After a while I gave up. There were far too few audio samples to answer any of the questions I got. They declined three stems of verbs in the textbook and never gave any hints on the pronunciation – neither transcription nor audio samples. How am I supposed to get it right, then? When I presented my learning progress to a French speaking friends all I earned was laughter. So I eventually gave up, put everything back in its box and returned it to the bookstore for a refund.
Instead I bought the Langenscheidt course “Französisch fertig los” which was actually three Euros cheaper and offered 4 CDs instead of just one. Did I enjoy any more success with this one? No, I did not. Even though there were some definite improvements such as transcriptions, still the audio samples were not all that helpful. I cannot help but wonder how anybody would manage to learn a language like that?
When it comes to CD language courses, am I living in a dream? Do language courses of the helpful kind really exist or am I a victim a of delusion? Well, they do exist. Years ago I bought a cheap Spanish language course – no publisher’s name on the box. Still, it was really helpful. There are 4 CDs in which four native speakers not only provide audio samples but also explain everything you need to know about this language and the Spanish culture. Do I speak Spanish now? Not really, but this time it was actually my fault, since I didn’t invest enough time. But if I had finished that language course, it would have gotten me somewhere – whereas the two French language courses by two very reputable publishers who dominate the foreign language market in Germany left me puzzled.
By the way, that beautiful photo of the Eiffel tower was taken by a lady called Camille and published in her photostream on Flickr.
This doesn’t seem to be my day. I tried to use Wengo as an alternative to Skype, however I failed miserably. As soon as I start it I get an audio error. Appearantly it doesn’t open /dev/dsp, while other applications don’t seem to have that problem. At least I’m 
I wonder if I am the only one having trouble with the WordPress backend recently. In two thirds of all cases, whenever I press just about any button, I end up getting a “Are you sure you want to do this?” dialogue. When I click yes, the dialogue re-appears. Either my Firefox is going awry or it’s in fact a bug in WordPress. Any feedback would be welcome.
After having read a 
The Wolfsburger Nachrichten newspaper finally published an article about our project. Even though I regret that not all sponsors were named it is a first step towards public recognition. Why is that necessary? Well, we need to spread the word around that there will be 30 well-educated students who will be looking for jobs in a couple of years. After all finding work is getting really difficult around here. And I for one would like to see these 30 students given a fair chance. Anyway, 
We have been talking about getting our school bell replaced by a more modern system. There already is a PA loudspeaker in every classroom. We could use this as a bell to signal when it’s time for a break. However we’d require a computer dedicated to this in the teachers’ lounge. There still is lots of hardware junk in our basement, so I thought it should be possible to revive some 75 MHz Pentium I computer to do this. Probably 
