Trip to the Blue Mountains

  • Jul 14, 2019
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I recently walked the Dardanelles Pass loop in the Blue Mountains, enjoying the spectacular scenery on a chilly and windy day.

Importing your own scanned text into LingQ

I love using LingQ for my language learning, and to make the most of it, I wanted to import one of my favourite French books that I have only in hardcopy. Whilst the LingQ process for importing text is as easy as could be, preparing the text involved a bit of trial and error, so I thought I would share what I do.

The book is La délicatesse by David Foenkinos, which is full of vocabulary I’d like to internalise. By the way, I love the movie with Audrey Tautou too.

Step 1: Scanning

I found it best to create individual scans of each double page, or to scan to a multi-page PDF, but it’s important not to scan with OCR (optical character recognition) turned on, so that you just have a plain PDF without any text in the background of the image. On the scanner I used the option is called a “non-editable PDF” – a slight misnomer, but anyway. If you produce a scan with OCR you may later have trouble overriding the default underlying text output – unless of course you can change the scanner’s OCR language to French, but with my office equipment that wasn’t possible.

Step 2: OCR process

I use a program called Nitro, but Adobe Acrobat would probably be similar. After importing the PDF, I go to Review > OCR > Options > Advanced, and select French as the recognition language. Then click OK, and the text recognition process only takes a few seconds.

Step 3: Create text document

Still in Nitro, I go Convert > To Word > Convert. A Word doc with the text opens up. In my experience there are some anomalies in the placement of some blocks of text, so I continue…

Step 4: Cleaning the text

I copy and paste the text in the correct order into a Notepad document. The purpose of this is to strip out any weirdness that comes from the Word doc.

Step 5: Assembling the text

I then copy and paste the text from Notepad into a WordPad document, which is easier to work with than Notepad. In WordPad I get rid of any OCR errors, for example hyphens that have magically turned into bullet points, or unnecessary spaces, etc.

It could be easier to edit in Word though. If you want to get rid of double or even triple spaces between words, you can do an easy copy/replace.

Save the file as a LingQ-compatible DOCX file if you import the whole book in once go.

Step 6: Importing the text

You can then use the Import ebook function in LingQ to easily create a lesson with the text you scanned.

Or you can create a new course and then add each chapter as a lesson.

Resources for learning French

I’ve been learning French since I was in 4th grade. For a long time I had a complicated love-hate relationship with this beautiful language, thanks to many years of relentless drilling, but now I just enjoy experiencing some French and Quebecois culture by reading, listening and speaking (a love interest certainly helps).

In this post I’ve collected some resources I’ve found particularly useful. I recommend a combination of various sources. No one source alone will get you to fluency.

Any questions or suggestions? I would love to hear them and include them in this post!

Keep Reading

9/11 revisited – an inconvenient news story?

Now here is something truly newsworthy: On 26 November, over two weeks ago, it was announced that at long last the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York has agreed to convene a special grand jury to consider important 9/11 evidence – evidence which has been dismissed, ignored and denied for years.

But since the press release was issued by the Lawyers’ Committee for 9/11 Inquiry and distributed by the not insignificant PR Newswire, only a handful of minor news outlets have picked up this story. Not even the New York Times thinks this announcement is worth mentioning. Nothing in the Australian media either. Zilch. Rien. Nada. Nichts. The obvious question is: why not? After all, the events of 9/11 served as a justification for a long series of war crimes committed by the US, aided and abetted by many countries, including Australia. So would not a truly free and independent media be keen to report on this latest development that could mark the beginning of the exposure of the potentially biggest and most brazen cover-up there ever was? What a headline story that would be! Maybe our media are afraid to be accused of spreading fake news or following a conspiracy theory, or they are worried about looking foolish for swallowing the official cock and bull story. But I think it’s more likely that a lot of people must be very keen to let sleeping dogs lie for as long as possible, and sadly the mainstream media seem either complicit or simply lack courage.

A very general Google search (from 11 Dec) says it all:

Compare and contrast with an equivalent search on an in my view ultimately pointless story:

#GIFITUP2018

Below my entry to the #GIFITUP2018 competition. I used Photoshop Elements to manipulate the original image, and EZGIF to create the animated GIF.

Ballongen “La Gustave” by Pierre-Antoine de Machy
Source: http://www.europeana.eu/portal/en/record/2064116/Museu_ProvidedCHO_Nationalmuseum__Sweden_97960.html?q=Painting

Not so WOW – seriously, Woolworths?

The other day I went shopping at Woolworths in Glenwood and I noticed a bench made from recycled plastic bags. How commendable indeed. A bench as shown on the excellent ABC TV series War on Waste, which by the way should be compulsory viewing in every school class around the country.

 

 

 

 

 

 

But then there is this in the very same shop, an entire aisle of fruit wrapped in plastic:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Seriously? I for one refuse to buy wrapped fruit like this.

Get your act together Woolworths, and walk the talk!