Inspite of the many FM radio stations in Chennai and the new ones that keep coming up every other month, the quality of content leaves a lot to be desired. By law, they are not supposed to be broadcasting news, so that leaves them with playing songs and having other programs like talk-shows, discussions with celebrities etc. And ofcourse the unavoidable commercials every now and then.
Tamil (the local language) is one of the best suited for any kind of audio composition, be it classical or melody or any of the other genres, apart from lending itself beautifully to any kind of lyrics - pure Tamil, Tanglish (Tamil+English), Tamil+Hindi etc. And to top that, the Tamil movie industry boasts of the best music directors, choreographers and lyricists in India.
And there are thousands of great songs already available, with newer ones coming in daily. Heck, I have on my PC atleast 4GB of Tamil MP3 songs of which I have been able to sort and burn into a CD only some 150 odd songs. But still at any given point of time, most of these FM stations would be playing some crappy songs.
So, my solution to this was to keep surfing the stations to get to some good songs. But given the fact that my car does not have steering-mounted audio controls and with the remote also konking off, doing this manually every few minutes is not fun.
And that is when I struck upon the idea of using the 1.5 hours of my commute time in a better and productive way. My friend Tracy had been kind enough to share his Pimsleur's Japanese learning course audio material with me. I had gone through one of the 10 units while I was in Japan and that was it.
Yesterday, I burned the 10 units onto a CD and decided to go through the 10 units and reach a stage where I can manage atleast basic Japanese. Like any other language, Japanese is not easy to learn. But then, it does not seem impossible also. For continuity sake, I went through Unit-1 once again and today finished Unit-2 on my way to work.
It sure is a good way to learn a foreign language - they make you repeat the words so many times and in different contexts that it really gets burned in your mind. Pretty good work by Pimsleur - I would surely recommend their language learning system.
Thanks Tracy, for sharing the learning material with me.
I can't wait to start Unit-3. Hopefully, in a week or 10 days, I should be able to complete the whole set. Ofcourse, since the learning methodology requires you to say aloud the words being taught, I seem to be inviting quite some funny stares from other road-users, who must be thinking I am some nut-case, since I am talking to myself. More so, because I don't have any wireless or wirefree cellphone answering apparatus hooked up.
Anyway, as long as I can master the language, I am least bothered about what others think. So, goodbye to crappy songs for atleast a week or so.
P.S. : To be correct, it is not 'Tamil', but 'Thamizh'. But then, how many Tamilians can pronounce the 'zh' sound, the way it should be ?
No comments:
Post a Comment