I’m on my phone, so can’t give links, but I encourage a dive into how japanese teach math vs US methods. A couple of points I remember:
-in the US, people who are goid at math get pushed into teaching math, so they often don’t understand why students make the mistakes they do. A large component of Japanese math education is predictive, so a good teacher should know where students are likely to go off the rails and adjust their teaching
-a passing grade in Japan is 60, which is good for math, if you understand 60% of some concepts, that’s not too bad, and the bulk of math education happens in hs. I recall I was involved with an exchange program that sent selected prefectural students to BC. One student was from one of the lower ranking schools, and was considered the weakest candidate academically. Wasn’t a bad kid, but was on the baseball team, so 95% of his effort was on the baseball field. He went to a BC high school where classes were in mid term and had to take a math test because that was scheduled and everyone was astonished because he had a perfect score.
-students in japan still aren’t permitted to use calculators
-they also don’t give partial credit, which is how I got thru my math courses.
Will try and toss some links tomorrow
I'm not sure if I'd be so harsh on the Roman alphabet. You don't want a system that encodes everything.
Something that floors my students is when I teach them about an abcedary, which is a chart that represents the letters by giving them a word that has the sound (A is for apple, etc) Because Japanese kana are the sound they represent, there is no need to create one.
About Michael's question, I think it would work in romanized Japanese because it is essentially creating an anglicized version of Japanese and the consonants plus the context can give enough clues to read them. However, Japanese don't process near as much text in roman letters, so that would be an issue.
2025-07-20 09:58:55
A couple of things about reading. It's a bit like second language acquisition, in that no one is guaranteed to acquire reading. There is a basic idea that reading is a interactive process that bounces back and forth between bottom up and top down, but beyond that, there is not much. There is an notion of orthographic depth, but it's often by speakers of one language (usually English) projecting onto other languages.
I tend to think of it a lot like umwelt, which is the unique subjective experience that an organism has that can not be understood by any other organism. Though it doesn't use the word, "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" by Thomas Nagel gets at that point. I'll leave it to Harmut to explain umwelt, along with merkwelt and wirkwelt in Uexküll's biosemiotic theory and I've never heard of any linguist taking this up, but I definitely will in another life where I am multi-lingual...
2025-07-19 21:07:30
It occurs to me that a lot of education should be guiding people to what they are good at. I always thought I was good at languages, but I realize that I am really good at the languages that are in roman letters. Had I known, I might have opted for vietnamese instead of thai, or even earlier, dove into chinese first (I have several english native friends who have fluency in Japanese and Chinese and all of them did Chinese first and I don’t know anyone who went the opposite way).
Couple of links
https://www.educationworld.com/a_admin/admin/admin074.shtml
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0020739X.2019.1614688#d1e163
There are a ton of pdfs as well.
I’m on my phone, so can’t give links, but I encourage a dive into how japanese teach math vs US methods. A couple of points I remember:
-in the US, people who are goid at math get pushed into teaching math, so they often don’t understand why students make the mistakes they do. A large component of Japanese math education is predictive, so a good teacher should know where students are likely to go off the rails and adjust their teaching
-a passing grade in Japan is 60, which is good for math, if you understand 60% of some concepts, that’s not too bad, and the bulk of math education happens in hs. I recall I was involved with an exchange program that sent selected prefectural students to BC. One student was from one of the lower ranking schools, and was considered the weakest candidate academically. Wasn’t a bad kid, but was on the baseball team, so 95% of his effort was on the baseball field. He went to a BC high school where classes were in mid term and had to take a math test because that was scheduled and everyone was astonished because he had a perfect score.
-students in japan still aren’t permitted to use calculators
-they also don’t give partial credit, which is how I got thru my math courses.
Will try and toss some links tomorrow
Charles, I gotta ask, don’t you wonder about quoting an LLM that can call itself ‘MechaHitler’?
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/why-does-the-ai-powered-chatbot-grok-post-false-offensive-things-on-x
Charles, I gotta ask, don’t you wonder about quoting an LLM that can call itself ‘MechaHitler’?
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/why-does-the-ai-powered-chatbot-grok-post-false-offensive-things-on-x
I'm not sure if I'd be so harsh on the Roman alphabet. You don't want a system that encodes everything.
Something that floors my students is when I teach them about an abcedary, which is a chart that represents the letters by giving them a word that has the sound (A is for apple, etc) Because Japanese kana are the sound they represent, there is no need to create one.
About Michael's question, I think it would work in romanized Japanese because it is essentially creating an anglicized version of Japanese and the consonants plus the context can give enough clues to read them. However, Japanese don't process near as much text in roman letters, so that would be an issue.
A couple of things about reading. It's a bit like second language acquisition, in that no one is guaranteed to acquire reading. There is a basic idea that reading is a interactive process that bounces back and forth between bottom up and top down, but beyond that, there is not much. There is an notion of orthographic depth, but it's often by speakers of one language (usually English) projecting onto other languages.
I tend to think of it a lot like umwelt, which is the unique subjective experience that an organism has that can not be understood by any other organism. Though it doesn't use the word, "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" by Thomas Nagel gets at that point. I'll leave it to Harmut to explain umwelt, along with merkwelt and wirkwelt in Uexküll's biosemiotic theory and I've never heard of any linguist taking this up, but I definitely will in another life where I am multi-lingual...
It occurs to me that a lot of education should be guiding people to what they are good at. I always thought I was good at languages, but I realize that I am really good at the languages that are in roman letters. Had I known, I might have opted for vietnamese instead of thai, or even earlier, dove into chinese first (I have several english native friends who have fluency in Japanese and Chinese and all of them did Chinese first and I don’t know anyone who went the opposite way).