4 ms·

can anyone corroborate this?

akud 10y ago
My high school Japanese teacher mentioned the college- before college dichotomy from the article. That is, that Japanese students are pushed very hard before college and then not at all during college.
bokumo 10y ago
I lived in Japan for nearly 3 years. I speak, or at least used to speak with fair fluency and I can confirm that this is somewhat accurate. I would add that many Japanese high schools are highly selective and very demanding of students. Graduates of these high schools often perform well in academic subjects and often overachieve in U.S. universities, but only the best students get into those high schools and many students are forced to choose from much less competitive schools. In short, education through high school is often very demanding, but Japanese colleges are quite easy for liberal arts students. Much less so for STEM subjects.
bokumo 10y ago
In the sense that the author uses the word "retarded" to mean that it takes Japanese longer to learn their language than other cultures then yes, the author is correct. Japanese students take until 6th grade to learn the 2,000 most common kanji characters. Most middle schoolers cannot read a newspaper. Heck even most high schoolers shy away from newspapers in Japan. Manga (comics) are the way most Japanese learn their language. One of the reasons that manga are so helpful is their usage of furigana which are small hiragana (phonetic alphabet) characters printed next to the more difficult kanji characters (pictograms). Japanese people come in a wide range of IQs just like any other culture. In my experience they are not any more stupid nor any more intelligent than the average U.S. citizen. They do often forget kanji characters, just like you would. It is common for Japanese to ask someone to jog their memory on how a character is written. In this case, people often respond by drawing the character on their palm or saying something like, "anshin no an" meaning it is the same "an" character as in the word "anshin". Language is very different when there are literally tens of thousands of characters to learn.
- yomly 10y ago
  >Language is very different when there are literally tens of thousands of characters to learn. Yes and no. Chinese-character based languages are conceptually different to languages employing Roman letters/an alphabet to the point where there isn't a great deal of transferability between Western and East-Asian languages. But people think in composites just as you said - people prompt each other with "anshin no an" or hand drawings. This isn't too different to thinking of spelling in composite blocks of syllables. Characters are to syllables what strokes are to letters. And people can describe characters in their composite strokes just as a syllable is a composite of letters. The difference is that the association is mechanical/visual, rather than aural. People making errors by using the wrong "an" or the wrong radical happens just like people getting the order of "i" and "e" mixed up in English... Or German, for that matter. I'd probably agree that there is a steeper learning curve with character based languages. Possibly even more so with Japanese - Chinese people don't really get the option of kana so are forced to master kanji/hanzi from a younger age through exposure if nothing else. That said, after a certain point, it does genuinely suddenly click. I used to snort in disbelief when my Japanese friend claimed he could memorize 100 kanji in 10 minutes (he was a bit of a machine to be fair) but after my first thousand I was able to memorise entirely new characters after barely a glimpse. Alas, you can forget them as quickly as you learned them!
  - wodenokoto 10y ago
    > Chinese-character based languages are conceptually different to languages employing ... arguably Japanese is not a Chinese character based language, but a Chinese character adopted language. Looking at Mandarin it kinda makes sense why a character based written language sprung up. Looking at Japanese and Korean, it boggles the mind why only the Koreans moved away from Chinese characters. Except for the borrowed words, spoken Japanese and Mandarin are as far removed as Mandarin and English.
    - dibujante 10y ago
      Japanese is very phoneme-poor. If they switched entirely to hiragana there would be too many indistinguishable homophones. Korean has more phonemes and escapes this somewhat. Of course, it would still be possible, but Japanese would have to develop some hiragana redundancy (multiple symbols all meaning the same syllable) so that homophones could be spelled differently.
metaphorm 10y ago
not a corroboration of the state of Japanese education, but a counterpoint that highlights that American educational system is also fuckin terrible http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/06/in-the-basement-of-the-ivory-tower/306810/ http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/06/in-the-b... similar scenario. the society and its insitutions pressure people into participating in academic life regardless of whether or not they have an aptitude for it. inevitably many of them basically fail and do so in ways that are shocking and appalling to their instructors. however, the institution itself (for a variety of reasons) will accommodate these people regardless of their poor state of educational attainment.

akud 10y ago

My high school Japanese teacher mentioned the college- before college dichotomy from the article. That is, that Japanese students are pushed very hard before college and then not at all during college.

bokumo 10y ago

I lived in Japan for nearly 3 years. I speak, or at least used to speak with fair fluency and I can confirm that this is somewhat accurate. I would add that many Japanese high schools are highly selective and very demanding of students. Graduates of these high schools often perform well in academic subjects and often overachieve in U.S. universities, but only the best students get into those high schools and many students are forced to choose from much less competitive schools. In short, education through high school is often very demanding, but Japanese colleges are quite easy for liberal arts students. Much less so for STEM subjects.

bokumo 10y ago

In the sense that the author uses the word "retarded" to mean that it takes Japanese longer to learn their language than other cultures then yes, the author is correct. Japanese students take until 6th grade to learn the 2,000 most common kanji characters. Most middle schoolers cannot read a newspaper. Heck even most high schoolers shy away from newspapers in Japan. Manga (comics) are the way most Japanese learn their language. One of the reasons that manga are so helpful is their usage of furigana which are small hiragana (phonetic alphabet) characters printed next to the more difficult kanji characters (pictograms). Japanese people come in a wide range of IQs just like any other culture. In my experience they are not any more stupid nor any more intelligent than the average U.S. citizen. They do often forget kanji characters, just like you would. It is common for Japanese to ask someone to jog their memory on how a character is written. In this case, people often respond by drawing the character on their palm or saying something like, "anshin no an" meaning it is the same "an" character as in the word "anshin". Language is very different when there are literally tens of thousands of characters to learn.

yomly 10y ago
>Language is very different when there are literally tens of thousands of characters to learn. Yes and no. Chinese-character based languages are conceptually different to languages employing Roman letters/an alphabet to the point where there isn't a great deal of transferability between Western and East-Asian languages. But people think in composites just as you said - people prompt each other with "anshin no an" or hand drawings. This isn't too different to thinking of spelling in composite blocks of syllables. Characters are to syllables what strokes are to letters. And people can describe characters in their composite strokes just as a syllable is a composite of letters. The difference is that the association is mechanical/visual, rather than aural. People making errors by using the wrong "an" or the wrong radical happens just like people getting the order of "i" and "e" mixed up in English... Or German, for that matter. I'd probably agree that there is a steeper learning curve with character based languages. Possibly even more so with Japanese - Chinese people don't really get the option of kana so are forced to master kanji/hanzi from a younger age through exposure if nothing else. That said, after a certain point, it does genuinely suddenly click. I used to snort in disbelief when my Japanese friend claimed he could memorize 100 kanji in 10 minutes (he was a bit of a machine to be fair) but after my first thousand I was able to memorise entirely new characters after barely a glimpse. Alas, you can forget them as quickly as you learned them!
- wodenokoto 10y ago
  > Chinese-character based languages are conceptually different to languages employing ... arguably Japanese is not a Chinese character based language, but a Chinese character adopted language. Looking at Mandarin it kinda makes sense why a character based written language sprung up. Looking at Japanese and Korean, it boggles the mind why only the Koreans moved away from Chinese characters. Except for the borrowed words, spoken Japanese and Mandarin are as far removed as Mandarin and English.
  - dibujante 10y ago
    Japanese is very phoneme-poor. If they switched entirely to hiragana there would be too many indistinguishable homophones. Korean has more phonemes and escapes this somewhat. Of course, it would still be possible, but Japanese would have to develop some hiragana redundancy (multiple symbols all meaning the same syllable) so that homophones could be spelled differently.

metaphorm 10y ago

not a corroboration of the state of Japanese education, but a counterpoint that highlights that American educational system is also fuckin terrible http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/06/in-the-basement-of-the-ivory-tower/306810/ http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/06/in-the-b... similar scenario. the society and its insitutions pressure people into participating in academic life regardless of whether or not they have an aptitude for it. inevitably many of them basically fail and do so in ways that are shocking and appalling to their instructors. however, the institution itself (for a variety of reasons) will accommodate these people regardless of their poor state of educational attainment.