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The trick to learning German, when a computer scientist, is obviously to think like a computer scientist. Why didn’t I think like this before?

Now adjective endings, a topic that normally completely and utterly freaked me out, as been boiled down to three rules, which you can apply in turn:

1. If you’re in the gentive or dative case, use -en. Always.
2. If you’re using a the definite article (der/die/das), then use -e, except for den (masculine accusative), which uses -en.
3. If you’re using the indefinite article (ein/eine/ein), then use the same ending as the ending of the definite article. (ie, der Mann ist ein dicker Mann, aber der Hund bisst einen dicken Mann.)

Why does this excite me?

Yesterday hit a very low point, but I pulled through and now I’m extremely happy with life. I went to see the Mars Volta play at the Carling Academy in Glasgow last night, and it was both inspiring and amazing, although I still maintain that Broken Social Scene was the best band I ever saw live. They’re quite similar to Mars Volta, (bare with me), in that it’s a “super group” of 7+ musicians, with a diverse range of instrumentation and playing a set in excess of 3 hours in length. The only difference is that Broken Social Scene certainly have more, shall we say, “conventional” songs than the Mars Volta.

Now I’m listening to the Mars Volta, practicing typing in Dvorak (not right at the moment, on dvorak.nl) and continuing in my study of German. I think I’m finally starting to reach the summit of the mountain of difficulty which is tied with learning German, and from here I can use what I’ve already learned to seriously improve it. As always, my reading ability is far stronger than my ability to speak or listen, but c’est la vie… no, wait… so ist das Leben!

My life for the next five weeks is fairly structured, at least as structured as I can make these things - in that I have a text file with things like “between 25th and 30th of March, move into new flat” written in it. I’m in Scotland for the next two weeks, enjoying home and showing some friends around Scotland next week, and then we return to Germany, where I move flat, and then entertain friends from my university back home until the next semester starts again on April 14th. So yes, good times planned ahead!

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Gestern war ich sehr traurig, aber danach habe ich etwas geschafft, und jetzt bin ich ganz froh. Ich habe gestern abend The Mars Volta gesehen, sie spielt in The Carling Academy in Glasgow. Sie haben mich stark beseelt und verwundert, aber denke ich noch, dass Broken Social Scene die besten Band ist, dass ich je um zu spielen gesehen habe. Sie sind aehnlich zu The Mars Volta, weil sie viele Musiker haben, divers Instrumentation (echt Deutsch, offensichtlich) haben, und ihre “set” sehr lang dauert (ueber drei Stunden). Der Unterscheid ist, dass sie mehr “conventional” Lieder spielen, aber das ist immer mir egal.

Gerade hoere ich zu The Mars Volta, lehre mich Dvorak (naja, ich schreibe nicht diesen Nachricht auf Dvorak, aber ich trainiere auf dvorak.nl) und lerne Deutsch. Ich denke, dass die grossten Schwierigkeit gegangen ist, und jetzt wird es einfacher sein, um es zu verbessern. Wie immer, meine Lesen ist am besten, Sprechen und Hoeren… nicht so gut. So ist das Leben… such is life.

Ich werde sehr beschaeftig sein, in den naechsten fuenf Wochen… Ich bin gerade in Schottland, und naecheste Woche werden ein Paar Freunden mich besuchen. Ich werde sie Edinburg zeigen, und vielleicht Inverness auch. Wir werden Glasgow zweifelsohne besuchen, als wir mussen nach Glasgow Prestwick fahren, der Flugzeug nach Deutschland zu nehmen. Danach werden ein Paar Freunden, die aus Schottland kommen, mich in Deutschland besuchen! Es gibt viele Moeglichkeiten und Plaene fuer unsere Zeit, aber kein, die bestimmt ist. Als eine alter Freundin von mir einmal mir gesagt hat, “Alles ist Moeglich.”. Ja, sie sagte es auf Deutsch.

Life has been pretty boring recently, trying to make a game for the first time in a program called Game Maker, which I slowly deviated from using like the drop and click interface it is, and now just has screeds and screeds of code snippets everywhere, hiding in amongst the icons of logic. It started off using tetris blocks as enemies, but I’m now changing that, and adding some music, then it shall be complete!

Also discovered the pinnacle of synaethesia that is Audiosurf. Riding your music, and collecting points, my two favourite pasttimes.

Apparently there is an echte Deutscher reading my posts now, so I’m gonna start putting them in German as well, good practice.

Das Leben jetzt hier im Saarland ist ziemlich langweilig. Ich versuche ein Videospiel zu machen - mein erste - im Game Maker, wo ich angefangt habe um seine “Drag and Drop interface” zu benutzen, aber jetzt es nur viele Code ueberalles gibt, zwischen den Bilder der Logik. Erst hat es Tetris Blocks statt Feinde, aber jetzt wechsele ich das, und adde ich Musik auch. Danach wird es fertig sein!

Auch habe ich “Audiosurf” entdeckt, das Spiel fuer Leute, die Synästhesie haben. Musikreiten, und Punkteabholen, meine Lieblingshobbies!

Offensichtlich gibt es ein echte Deutscher, der gerade mein blog liest, also werde ich meine Nachrichten auch auf Deutsch schreiben.

Writing emails to people, telling them that you’re planning to fail, is always hard. Well, I say always hard, but it’s the first time I’ve done it, yikes.

Deutschland, wo die Schaffe selten Brille tragen, is turning out to be an experience and a half.  (Where the sheep seldom wear glasses.)  We went to Mainz for the end of Carnival (which I learned today means “the period where we don’t eat meat”, from the same root as carnivore), where I dressed as a Scotsman and saw a giant float of the Pope. Oh man, these are the days of our lives.

But not like that damn Portal song. Man, the amount of love for that damn game has almost made me hate it, purely through being sick to the teeth of hearing about it. Of course, I’ll reserve my judgement until I play it!

Auf jeden Fall, bin ich noch Alive! But somewhat at odds with life at the moment. I’ll cut it down to a short film script for you. I present to you:

WINTER OF DISCONTENT

A film in 1 act.

Act 1

Scene 1

[We open with a shot of a single table in a darkened, damp room. The table is mahogany, and shows signs of use for at least 10 years. We pan slowly up and right, revealing a ticking cuckoo clock, when light floods into the room from the left. We pan across quickly, revealing an open flood-lit doorway, that a dark shadow steps through, and sits down at the table. The camera pans back, until we see the torso of a man. The man coughs, reaches into his jacket pocket, and withdraws a cigarette. He lights it, draws, and allows the room to fill with smoke, before the camera raises to capture his smoke-obscured face. He coughs again, and begins to speak.]

SHADOW

Steve’s found he has no real interest in his chosen courses, so he’s decided to not pursue them this semester.

[The cuckoo clock whirrs, and a wooden bird pops out of a door near the top of the clock. The shot fades out as the cuckoo sounds its ominous chirp 76 times.]

Well, there you have it. So, I plan to do next semester, pick more exciting courses, and reveal the inner mysteries of the universe in the meantime. By that, I mean, finally learn how to program in C++, write some music, and practice my German! Of course, I have to go back to Edinburgh and redo the first semester of third year, but I want to do this, especially with courses I’ll actually enjoy!

Any questions? Why not download the funky NES-remix of a Chairman Wow song here?

www.chairmanwow.net/music/chipsonspeed.mp3

I’ve spent the past few days playing Bookworm Adventures, which is essentially what happens when Scrabble and Final Fantasy decide to settle down with each other and have kids. It’s very much possible that it’s the best £7 I’ve ever spent. Combined with Puzzle Quest, where you defeat enemies by playing Bejeweled with them, I’ve developed quite a taste for RPGs where you don’t just keep on pressing the A button until the dragon dies.

Last night was obviously New Year’s Eve, which we call Hogmanay here, I spent a few hours drinking, playing cards and listening to music with some friends, then we headed over to a house party. The hosts wanted to walk to the Bridges for the bells, so we walked for half an hour to North Bridge, where the fireworks went off about 3 seconds after we arrived. After the almost endless barrage, we walked back to our original location, played more cards, and then went back to the house party, for more cards. I don’t usually play so much cards at New Year’s, I’m developing some small skill in poker as well, which should serve me well back in Deutschland.

New Year’s Resolutions are to learn German, which I may have left a bit late, and to enjoy myself. Why lie with anything else?

Also, I received my first proper Christmas presents today - two DVDs - both of which I’m excited about. Thank you, anonymous stranger!

Yesterday was somewhat of a mad shopping spree, having only received money for Christmas this year. A few hours of rushing around Edinburgh, dodging the influx of Big Issue salespersons, and now I have a fairly larger amount of clothes. The bloodlust of capitalism was surging through me, I was almost scared by it. Anyway, I wanted to go to the cinema, so I asked a friend to come out. Things happened, Italian buffets were eaten, optical cables were purchased, and eventually we managed to miss the showing, so we just decided to drink instead.

Big mistake. Drank, visited the Jinglin’ Geordie on Fleshmarket Close, met an old friend, and then missed the last train back to my home town of West Calder. I decided to head over to my ex-flatmate’s house to sleep there, and ran into another friend of mine in Whistlebinkies. Had a drink, had another, watched a folk band and screamed for the Dashing White Sergeant until we had a miniature ceilidh going with some South Africans and Americans. Introducing new people to ceilidhs is always fun, believe me. For those of you playing along in countries which are not Scotland, a ceilidh is a night of traditional Scottish dancing, which just involves dancing with loads of people, spinning around a lot, and generally making it up as you go along.

The rest of the night is pretty hazy, but I remember speaking my one sentence of Gaelic (see below) to a guy from the Hebrides, but then he went a bit “No Surrender” on me (read: he was trapped in the 19th century, in a bad and prejudiced way), so I tried to steer clear of him after that.

I woke up today, with Martyn asking me why the hell I was in his house after he’d just arrived back home from Norn Iron (Northern Ireland), to which I said I wasn’t entirely sure. I spent the majority of the day nursing a hangover, catching up with Martyn, and watching back-to-back Family Fortunes and Wheel of Fortune.

What lies in store for me for the rest of my time in Scotland? I really hope it doesn’t involve alcohol.

“My theory is that all of Scottish cuisine is based on a dare.”

– Mike Myers

No kidding. Apparently “chips ‘n cheese”, a fine Scottish delicacy — take deep-fat-fried chips, melt cheese over the top, and if you’re the right sort of man, you put “sauce”* on it as well… — contains enough calories for a man for a whole day. I’ve probably eaten two portions in a day at least once in my life…

*sauce, or chippy sauce, is brown sauce + vinegar

Why am I spending my time at 2am, the morning of Christmas Eve, learning Gaelic? I’m about ten minutes into the process, and it seems to be impossible to learn. How does one remember pronunciations like:

Ciamar a tha sibh? [kyah-mar ah hah shiv?] (How are you?)

Tha mi gu math, tapadh leibh. [tah me goo ma, tah puh-liff] (I’m well, thank you.)

Incredible. Any normal English words are twisted into something resembling an explosion at the Alphabites factory; television becomes the plausible “telebhisean”, while Katy becomes “Ceitidh”.

My problem is that I have started learning a lot of languages, but I can only really speak English, with a smattering of German if I’ve had enough beer. In my time I’ve learned - for at least 20 minutes - French, Chinese Mandarin (for 6 months, actually), Esperanto, Japanese, Afrikaans, Gaelic, German, and probably some which I’ve forgotten in the mists of time. I’ve got nothing to really show for it, except my knowledge of things like “relative clauses”, “the genitive case” and “transitive verbs”. I highly doubt any of those things will become useful at some stage in my life. Fear not, man drowning at the beach, I can split those infinitives, and find you a rubber ring to knock you unconscious with when I attempt to throw it to you!

The reason it’s a problem, apart from me retaining little of the languages I attempt to learn, is that I’m wasting valuable German learning time. If I enjoy learning about this language so much, why not practice my German instead? I could probably speak like I’ve lived in Bavaria all my life if I just put my mind to it. Maybe. I’m not claiming to be a linguistic genius, but I do waste a lot of time learning other languages.

In other news, Merry Christmas. Buy a Wii.

Last night was St. Nikolaus Eve, and I woke up this morning to find a Father Christmas-shaped chocolate stuck to my door! Sadly, there was no money.

Motivation is hard to come by here, and there’s far too many distractions. Today, I will work. No seriously, stop laughing.