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Awhile back I had a daily threehour commute, so I decided to learn another language. My cousin moved to Split for work, but the resources for Croatian were a bit limited. One of my friends then moved to Quebec and that seemed to seal the deal for me. I have an old PowerPC Mac lying about, so I signed up for ¨coffee-break French¨ on iTunes. (It was horrible by the way). I figured (wrongly) that if one could learn something in a coffee-break, I would string all those coffee-breaks together in my commute. Gzip all those short tutorials into one commute zip file. Initially, the going was tough. French seemed to be related to English, but English was not my first language. I signed up for a few other French podcasts, but listening to French people babble is weird to say the least. (No offence intended, our French translation team do an excellent job!). However, it is not a way to learn.
Il y a quelque temps, j'avais un trajet quotidien de trois heures et j'ai donc décidé d'apprendre une autre langue. Mon cousin a déménagé à Split pour son boulot, mais les ressources pour la langue croate étaient quelque peu limitées. Ensuite, une de mes amis a déménagé à Québec et cela était tout ce qu'il me fallait pour me décider. J'ai un vieux Mac PowerPC à disposition ; aussi, je me suis inscrit pour « coffee-break French » (le français des pauses café) sur iTunes. (Au fait, c'était nul.) De façon erronée, je pensais que, si l'on pouvait apprendre quelque chose pendant une pause café, il me suffirait de rassembler toutes les pauses café pour les étudier pendant mon trajet. Mettre tous ces courts tutoriels ensemble dans un seul fichier zippé avec Gzip, pour les trajets. Au départ, c'était compliqué. Le français semblait apparenté à l'anglais, mais l'anglais n'était pas ma langue maternelle. Je me suis inscrit pour recevoir des podcasts en français, mais écouter le babillage des Français est bizarre, pour ne pas en dire davantage. (Je le dis sans arrière-pensée irrespectueuse, car l'équipe française de traduction fait un travail excellent !) Cependant, ce n'est pas comme cela que l'on peut apprendre.
The good thing was, there seemed to be lots of other resources on the internet. I have my (t)rusty Linux laptop to help me on my way, with the excellent flashcard program Anki. At first, Anki may not look like much, and the translation in the local vernacular is poor at best, but it is actually very quick to set up. It is also very simple to use. My first hiccup came trying to add a letter with a cedilla. (Under greetings, ‘how are you’, in French). The last time I needed to do this was in Ubuntu single digits, when I could use the control key (alt key?) to modify letters when typing. I looked at the keyboard layout and options, but could not find the option for the modifier key. The typing options now contained only ‘switch to previous or next input source’. Disappointed, I installed the character map and was even more disappointed to find the keys do not have shortcuts listed. Clicking the needed character, then clicking copy, then pasting it into a text box, makes it really tedious work. - Hey, I am lazy, I like to work smarter, not harder.
Again, pointing to a modifier key was no longer an option. Pressing ctrl+u and the hex code, also did nothing. I did not want to go through all of setxkbmap options, poking and prodding here and there. How could I know the UTF-8 and UTF-1 6 encoding for a character, but fail to type it on my own computer? What did I do wrong? I knew! Since I was using XFCE, it had to be XFCE´s fault. Prodding around with XFCE and its related forums, I ended up where I started. Modifier key… Maybe it was because I did a minimal install? I suppose there was no option but to go fetch the terminal and sudo. (Admit it, you always get those two when there is a problem to be handled).
Luckily, I had an issue with an accounting program on a few Windows PCs just then and had to modify the regional settings for each of them. Then I got so busy that day, I did nothing further on the Linux machine. When I got home, I decided to do it all over on my home PC to check if I can see where I made my mistake. My home PC is a Solus install. The regional settings came to mind. I changed languages, et cetera, but to no avail. I looked at my keyboard again in the layout display, and that is when I saw it! Somehow, I had gotten so lazy with the easy installation of Linux, that I had the installer choose my keyboard. I noticed English (US). Choosing English (Intl) brought back all my special keys with a simple right-alt key press. (Lesson learnt with blindly pressing next).
This made everything easy again. I could whiz in and out of text files or Anki with umlauts and whatnot. This made me hungry for learning more, and I actually found that the other European languages have sentence construction similar to the local vernacular. Now I am learning ten new languages with the help of open source tools and enjoying it immensely. I really wish I could have discovered this thirty years earlier. Mistakes will be made. Just be prepared to walk away from the problem to get a fresh perspective. I have lots of problems, but Linux is not one of them.