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20 sats \ 3 replies \ @Signal312 10 Dec \ on: 7 things I like about Japan’s educational system Education
Two comments:
  • On a trip to Japan once, I walked by a what looked like a middle school. In the playground, they had a neatly hung up set of...unicycles! I wish I had seen them actually being used, but the kids were inside. But, what a fun thing for kids to have available - and it sure wouldn't have happened in the US because of "safety".
  • I've had occasion to interact with a number of Japanese teens, visiting the US for a "language exchange". It always shocked me, how bad their English was. It was mostly truly terrible, especially considering that they told me they'd studied English for long period of time - like 7 years, 10 years. How is that even possible?
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48 sats \ 2 replies \ @Rothbardian_fanatic 10 Dec
The language problem is due to how they teach English pronunciation. They teach English pronunciation using katakana, which are a Japanese syllabari, using their pronunciation. They lack several sounds in Japanese that we use in English, for instance: /f/, /v/, theta, the vocal theta, /r/, /l/ and any diphthongs that we use in English. We also lack some of the sounds that the Japanese use in their language, such as tsu, ra, ri, ru, re, or, fu, and all of the vowel portions of the syllables. So, we have an accent when we speak Japanese, too.
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30 sats \ 1 reply \ @cryotosensei OP 11 Dec
I love how you gave a balanced view of the pluses and gaps of both English and Japanese
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Rothbardian_fanatic 11 Dec
Different languages are different. There are a lot of sounds that make up languages, but one language never uses them all, AFAIK. For me to learn one foreign language, I had to walk around the school saying the sounds that weren’t in my language. It took hours and hours to get them right. It also took a lot of feedback. Since I do not really have an ear for the tune of a language, I still have troubles, no matter how good my pronunciation is. You know you are having language problems when someone whose language you are speaking looks at you like you are speaking blather and doesn’t understand at all.
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