Psychotomy

project A we finished last week (good, b/c it was due last wednesday .. wonder if the people who set the deadline have looked at it at all …)

project B is on stall until we can find a way to POLITELY browbeat someone into letting us actually talk to the person with the answers. Person Z is our contact. Person Y asked a bunch of questions. Person X has the answers. Person Z never seems to get the meaning when we ask “can we talk to Person X to get the answers we need for Person Y” :/ so, we’re stalled indefinitely.

so, this week at the office I’m reading my Zend PHP Certification guide. I figure once I’m hired I’ll look into the policies on certs. If they’ll pay for them, I’ll probably go for the PHP, LPI level 2 and MySQL DBA certs. Of course, those last two are 2nd level, and each level has 2 tests, at 200$ a pop … i am SOOOO not paying for that myself :o

Otherwise, I’m making another hack at learning hindi. Why not! just b/c the last dozen times or whatever have failed miserably is no reason to think this one will too! this time I’m going with written. learn to mimic words, then learn to pronounce them. I’m going about it like your average 3-5 yr old learning to read/speak by reading aloud. Of course, hindi primers are all in devangari (the character set), and I have no basis for knowing what those mean (although I did find a site… uh, wonder where I put that URL … anyway, it goes through the alphabet and tells you how to pronounce the letters and some of the common letter-combos (like ie, ae, etc)). So I’m working with that, a big list of english words and their hindi versions in devangari, and trying to figure out how to say things.

I’m doing this by translating Dr Seuss ;) If Green Eggs and Ham, Cat in the Hat, and Horton Hears a Who are good enough to teach kids english, then they should be able to teach me some (relatively useless) hindi phrases. Once I have a base, maybe I can go from there.

I figure that I may put up the translations, assuming I can figure out if that’s allowed since Seuss is still under copyright so the fulltext isn’t online in english … otherwise, I may put up phrases or something.

And then I’m going to work on a “Hindi Primer for Americans” b/c we do NOT pronounce things like the brits. The second o in Library … wtf are you talking about? there’s NO o, let alone TWO!!! :)

Heck, if this works for me, maybe I’ll do Hebrew too. See if I can figure out how to sell my Language Mastery plan for fat cash. retire rich at the age of 25 and live high on the hog, just me and my buxom wench! And the puppy, obviously. duh!

Posted in: hindi, work by attriel /