New Year's resolutions (V)

It has already been 5 years since I started to share my resolutions for the New Year. During these years I have always tried to be realistic, and I was able to achieve a lot of what I was planning to do during the next year. I have just reviewed my resolutions for the year 2012, and I have to say that I tried hard to do what I promised, and I got some positive results. Unfortunately, there were a lot of unexpected events this year, some of them pleasant, but others quite unfortunate. I know that all that events are beyond my will, but I will try harder this year to fulfill my expectations. I think that next year will be a year full of opportunities and I have to try to take advantage of them.

During this year I accepted a challenge, and I had the opportunity to teach some students, and I enjoyed that experience a lot. And more important, I realized that I can do things that I consider I am not able to do. Therefore, it was more than a very good experience, it was a valuable lesson for me.

Apart from the fact of realizing that I am capable of doing things I thought I couldn't do, I also learnt new skills. I started to learn French more seriously, and now I feel more confident when reading writings in this language. Besides, I started learning how to program Android apps, and I am reviewing other skills that I had partially forgotten. In summary, I am trying to make a good use of my time. 

I also met a lot of people with whom I spent the good and bad times during this year. They are the most valuable thing of the year, the most precious treasure I can keep.

At this point, I have to make my resolutions for the year 2013. I intend to keep improving my English and French level, and practice them as much as possible (that is the only way to stay fluent). I also want to keep learning programming Android, and building amazing apps, and also learning new skills in this field. I would love to meet new friends like the ones I am lucky to have now. It would be great if the current situation in Spain and the world improves, most people don't deserve this kind of punishment.

There are several other resolutions that I am going to make, but I am not going to write them down here because I did it in the past and I was not able to fulfill them. Therefore, I am not going to do the same but I will try harder to achieve that "invisible" resolutions.

Finally, in order to finish this post I would like to wish you all a very Happy New Year!!!

P.S. I have to say that I celebrated New Year's Eve the typical Spanish way on the 30th December for the first time (Apparently, it is a new tradition in Spain to celebrate this date before the real time. Crazy, isn't it?).

Song in French

If you have read previous posts on this blog, you would probably know that I have been learning French for a while. My level in French is quite low, but I am trying to learn something new every day. Today, I am going to show you here a song I have listened to recently, and I was amazed because I understood a lot of it. I hope that this means that I am improving, even if it is slower than I would like. I am not in a rush to learn French, but it is very comforting to see some improvement from time to time.

Ma chambre a la forme d'une cage
Le soleil passe son bras par la fenêtre
Les chasseurs à ma porte comme les petits soldats
Qui veulent me prendre

Je ne veux pas travailler, je ne veux pas déjeuner
Je veux seulement l'oublier et puis je fume...

Déjà j'ai connu le parfum de l'amour
Un million de roses ne m'embaumerait pas autant
Maintenant une seule fleur dans mes entourages me rend malade

Je ne veux pas travailler, je ne veux pas déjeuner
Je veux seulement l'oublier et puis je fume...

Je ne suis pas fière de ça, vu qu'il veut me tuer
C'est magnifique et très sympathique
Mais je ne le connais jamais

Je ne veux pas travailler, non, je ne veux pas déjeuner
Je veux seulement l'oublier et puis je fume...

And below is the English translation of this song.

My room has the shape of a cage
The sun passes his arm around my window
Hunters at my door, like soldiers
that want to catch me.

I don't want to work, I don't want to have breakfast
just want to forget it, and then I smoke

I had already known the perfume of love
A million roses wouldn't stun me so much
Now, one next to me makes me sick

I don't want to work, I don't want to have breakfast
just want to forget it, and then I smoke

I'm not proud of it, after seeing that it wants to kill me
It's great and very likeable,
but I don't know him.

I don't want to work, I don't want to have breakfast
just want to forget it, and then I smoke

Finally, you can listen to the song following this link.

What is love?

I remember a song from the 90's called "What's love?" by Haddaway. It is dance music, and I like to listen to it when I am running or doing some exercise because it is encouraging. The thing is that I never paid attention to the letter of this song, therefore I don´t know what love is.

However, in a second thought I am going to tell you about my idea of what love is. I am not going to write here a complex definition about how love mechanisms work, or discuss whether it is fate related or just some chemical reaction.
In my opinion, love happens when we stop being selfish, and start to worry about somebody else. That is basic love, and it is very simple to explain. Then, of course, there are different kinds of love. I am sure that you can find several classifications on the Internet, but the idea behind all of these kinds of love should be the same, the one I wrote above.
I like to write more in my entries on the blog, but I consider that I have nothing else to write about this subject. And I think that because sometimes less is more.
Well, just one more thing. In case you are interested in the song I mentioned before, you can watch the video here.

Confidence

I have just been watching a couple of videos about conversation skills in English, and I have realized that these videos can encourage some friends of mine who are having problems of confidence when they have to speak English. I would like them to know how much fun they are missing just because of their fear. It doesn't matter if you make mistakes, who doesn't? It is part of the learning process.
During a conversation, whatever the language is, you need to keep it alive. Therefore, you can't stop talking continuously, or whenever you make a mistake. You have to keep going. The most important thing is that, in the end, people you are talking to can understand the message you are trying to communicate.
Below, you can click a couple of links where you can watch the videos I refer to above. I hope you enjoy them and I would love if they help you to overcome your fears.
Video 1
Video 2

Small print

Are most of us illiterates? It feels that way. Lately, it seems that you can't read if you forget to read the small print in every kind of texts, mostly in the important ones. Besides, the small print is getting smaller and smaller. Eventually, it will be necessary an electronic microscope to read it.
Do you have the same feeling I have? I am almost sure that everybody is trying to deceive us. In response to that, people is getting more and more suspicious about other people. This is similar to an snowball effect.
I must admit that I have always been a bit distrustful, and I can't help it. What can I do? It must be in my genes, I don't know. However, in the current situation, I consider this quality really valuable. It can help you to avoid being a victim of most part of  deceptions.
Small print has become a powerful tool. Unfortunately, it is a useful and simple tool to hide important information in order to scam people. It is useful because it really works, and it is simple because you only have to change the font size of letters in a way that you can make a lot of people be unaware of certain critical conditions in all sort of legal documents.

This is my advice. If you ever read a paragraph like this, you are not a fool and you are not easy to deceive. Make sure you read and understand the whole text before signing anything.

Heroism

Two brothers have just finished their daily run of about 12 miles. They are walking next to the lake when they hear a big noise and see how a trolleybus was sinking after falling from the dam wall. The older brother swam to the place where he saw the trolleybus sink. He dived into the water in order to help almost one hundred people who where inside that underwater coffin.

When he reached the trolleybus at 10 meters below surface he had to break the back window with his bare feet, and he started to pick up people and bring them back to the surface, where his brother took care of them. He recovered around 30 people from the lake bottom, but only 20 survived. After all that effort in those extreme conditions (cold water, zero visibility, the wounds in his legs, and water pollution) he fainted and remained in a coma for 45 days. All this ruined his brilliant career as finswimmer (11-time World Record holder, 17-time World Champion, 13-time European Champion and 7-time USSR Champion, and he was only 23 years old).
What would you think about the story above? Do you think it is real or just the plot of the last movie I watched? I would probably think the same as you, but the truth is that it really happened. It was in 1976, and the hero in this story is Shavarsh Karapetyan who wasn't recognized by his heroism until 2 years after the event. This delay was due to the fact that, apparently, politicians didn't want to make public the inability of the rescue services to handle the situation. This wasn't the only time he risked his life to save people. In 1985, he was again severely injured when he entered a burning building that had people trapped inside to help them to get out.
In my opinion, this world needs more people like this man, who are able to risk their lives to save other's. Unfortunately, there are more people who are willing to hurt others in order to get their goals. As an example, we have the person who kept hidden this story for two years, just to avoid taking responsibility for the fact that someone who worked for him wasn't doing his job correctly. I just hope that all of us are heroes, and if the situation requires it we will be willing to help no matter what it takes.
I have a question. Why on earth do we idolize athletes, artists, or politicians and we ignore people like this real hero? Do you have an answer?

Some news

It has been a while since my last post. I think I was not in the mood for writing. But, now I am, or at least I am writing and I hope I will post it, eventually.
I put English learning aside for a while, and almost everything else. However, I came back stronger than ever (I mean, I came back), and now I continue trying to improve my English, and I started to learn French in a more serious way, studying a bit every day. I will let you know when my writing skills in French are good enough by my standards writing something here.
For now, I am trying to expand my vocabulary, and get used to listen to people speaking French. In order to help me to get my goal, I am using several tools, but the most helpful until now is this website. They use an interesting method to teach languages (Spanish, French, and German at this time). As part of your learning process, you have to make translations of pieces of documents that you can find on the Internet.

The man behind this idea is the same that invented well-known applications captcha and re-captcha. The main idea of this project is quite similar to the one behind re-captcha. A lot of people will help to do a huge job that computers are not able to do by themselves yet. Indeed, translating all the documents on the web to the most extended languages in the world is not easy task. However, this project intends to use millions of people to help to get the job done.
In my opinion, the most clever idea is the way to achieve that that amount of people help with the task for free. And the answer is giving them (or us, because I am a user too) a quality language course in return. Moreover, there are experts that think this could be Google's next big acquisition (for more information, read this article).
Anyway, I think it is a very helpful and amusing project, and I believe it is going to help me learn French and who know what other languages.

P.S. If you are interested in learning or improving a language, I recommend you to try this tool.