What your foreign language teacher never told you about CPUs

This guy's on his way to Foreign language ownage!

Thanks to Khatzumoto at ajatt.com for introducing me to the wonderful world of Batch Files

For those of you who feel you are too poor, busy, old, stupid (you probably have more specific excuses that are applicable to your unique situation, just pretend I mentioned them) to learn a language, there is hope.

Going to another country is not necessarily the easiest way to immerse yourself in and learn a foreign language

It turns out it is a lot cheaper, less time consuming, and much less stressful to immerse yourself in the comfort of your own home, car, workspace, etc than by going to live/work in a foreign country. The reason is, provided you are reading this from your own computer, you have at your disposal a secretary/servant/slave who will obey every order you give it, and all for the cost of running your computer all day long - which you probably already do - and an internet connection.

Going abroad for immersion
Cost  = plane ticket, lost productivity/jobOpps/sanity, loneliness, mistake-ridden survival L2 and a bad accent that the natives won't correct because it is too embarrassing
Benefit = access to lots of native speakers, cheap target language materials, L2 television.

Stay at home and use your CPU as a language learning slave
Cost = keep paying your monthly internet and electricity bill.
Benefit = relaxed learning pace, more time to find the things you like and study these in your L2, unlimited immersion all day long!

You do the math...


Right now you are probably thinking " Wait... I have a slave under my influence!? and all I have to do to keep it going is...keep doing what I've already been doing?! XDDD" It's actually not that easy: the catch is  you must be able to communicate in your slave's language, namely batch programming. But that's a sinch. Or if you are really lazy. You could just copy the code I have provided below and save it in a notepad/wordpad/word program as a batch file (i..e save as > *****.bat) The following are instructions for setting yourself up for continuous immersion, which science has proven is essential for learning a language to fluency.

1.  Ensure you have a generous amount of target language Podcasts downloaded from itunes,  TV stream urls copied from video sharing websites like youtube, baidu, youku, niconicovideo, nonstoptube, etc. and plenty of music.
2.  Create(or just copy the following batch files I have provided below) an automated immersion environment by organizing this media into folders. This can be done by creating two separate batch files and having a task scheduler such as Windows Task Scheduler or Karen's Countdown Timer automate these. The first batch file will play files in your L2 media library at random, the second one will ensure that your immersion environment is on constantly, turning on your main batch file when it sees your media player is off.

Here are those wonderful batch files. Copy, paste, and edit as you please. Any suggestions for improvements are more than welcome. I'm sort of a noob at this whole programming thing...
Batch File 1: playaudio.bat
@echo off
taskkill /f /im vlc.exe
REM Thanks for help www.computing.net/answers/programming/batch-file-random-number/18837.html
set /a R=%random%%%5+1
IF %R% == 1 (start /min C:\"Program Files (x86)"\VideoLAN\VLC\vlc.exe "F:\My Passport\My Audio\Japanese Audio\Japanese Movie Audio\3 minute divisions" --random )
IF %R% == 2 (start C:\Users\Will\Documents\"Batch Files"\JTVaudio.bat)
IF %R% == 3 (start /min C:\"Program Files (x86)"\VideoLAN\VLC\vlc.exe "C:\Users\Will\Documents\Batch Files\J-Podcasts.m3u" --random --volume=90 )
IF %R% == 4 (start /min C:\"Program Files (x86)"\VideoLAN\VLC\vlc.exe "C:\Users\Will\Documents\Batch Files\Currently Most Liked.m3u" --random --volume=45 )
exit
cls

Batch File 2: immersionchecker.bat
@echo off
C:\"Program Files"\PrcView_5_2_15\pv.exe > C:\Users\Will\Documents\result.txt
FIND /I "vlc" C:\Users\Will\Documents\result.txt
IF ERRORLEVEL 1 start C:\Users\Will\Documents\"Batch Files"\playaudio.bat
cls
exit

3. Keep these batch files running periodically using a task scheduler like Windows Task Scheduler or Karen's Countdown Timer.

4. Just show up and be immersed.

5.Win at life.