Tag Archives: education

Learning how to write in Japanese: the contribution of scatology

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Unko (=poop) Kanji Doriru (=drill), the book’s cover (NB: the title is in all three Japanese writing systems)

Learning how to write is by no means an easy task in any script. It appears however that writing systems with a respectable number of signs are more challenging to memorize. One such instance is Japanese: it has three different writing systems (kanji: over 2,000 signs borrowed from Chinese; hiragana: 46 syllabic signs for the writing of Japanese words; katakana: another 46 syllabic signs for the writing of foreign words).

 

A publishing house put out on the market just last March a series of books to help school children with their daunting task. Bunkyosha named the series “Unko Kanji Drill.” The concept of the book is thus explained: ‘Unko is the Japanese word for poop. It comes out of your butt and it stinks. If there’s one thing that all kids can agree on, it’s that poop is funny. So by incorporating potty humor into learning, the creators set out to make kanji learning fun and hilarious, instead of boring and tedious.’

The series are introduced by the main character, ‘Unko Sensei’ (‘Master Poo’), who bears an uncanny resemblance to a pile of poo. The Sensei introduces in each page the kanji, then lists three examples, where the kanji is combined, in some magical manner, with poo! The books are said to contain 3,018 poo-involving sentences that function as examples. This is what a page looks like:

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the kanji 取 (take) (from the site Spoon & Tamago)

And the example sentences for 取 work like this:

  1. The man took poop in his hand to face his difficulties
  2. A foreign news outlet came to interview me about my poop (note: the kanji for interview is 取材, literally ‘gather material’)
  3. I had to dictate the word poop 100 times (note: the kanji for dictate is 書き取り, literally ‘write take’)

The response from parents and pupils has been enthusiastic, and the series seems to sell like crazy, recently reaching 1.83 million copies.

Motivation to study combined with fun is a good thing, thinks a mother who also happens to be a teacher. Because, let’s face it: which 6-year old in his/her right mind would pass on the opportunity to muck about, and have full parental approval while they are at it?

Handwriting vs. typing in Chinese

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A computer screen with Chinese characters (screen shot taken from the below mentioned BBC video)

A BBC reporter traveled all the way to China, to see, among other things, how electronic devices are affecting Chinese writing. A short video tells the story.

It seems that ‘devices in China feature a system that allows users to type words using the Roman alphabet and then select the corresponding characters.’ Chinese writing comprises over 50,000 characters, but some 1,000 are the ones mostly and commonly used, so it was obvious that some sort of mediating writing system had to come between this complex writing system and the smart phone user.

Cameron Andersen traveled to Anyang, a city in China’s northern Henan province, and visited the National Museum of Chinese Writing. There, he met with Richard Sears, an American who appears to have dedicated his life to the recognition of the provenance of the Chinese signs, i.e. their etymology (although this term is borrowed from linguistics and has a very specific meaning in that context).  It would be unfair to criticize a person’s life work in the narrow space of a blog post, but Sears promotes a theory about the beginning of Chinese writing that is popular with numerous researchers of various writing systems: that the characters can be shown to resemble some object or other, and that their original inspiration came from the copying of said object.

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National Museum of Chinese Writing, explanatory panel (screen shot taken from the above BBC video)

This particular theory has also been suggested as an explanatory tale for the genesis of other scripts, for instance for the (Phoenician) alphabet (which was adopted to create the Greek alphabet; which, in its turn, became the prototype for the Roman alphabet, making it the ancestor of numerous alphabets used until this day, such as the one I am writing in/you are reading in right now). It is thought, for instance, that the sign ‘A’ acquired its phonetic value through a rebus principle, whereby at the beginning it stood for the initial of the word ‘alef’, meaning ‘bovine’; the supporters of this theory would like to see ‘A’ as a development from the schematic rendering of a bovine head. With a simple internet search I found a couple of graphics on how this theory works:

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The difficulty lies in the fact that we usually have very little evidence for the beginning of writing, and no theory can be suggested to be valid or common for all writing systems. An additional difficulty with this sort of theories is that the recognition of a presumed visual prototype behind any sign involves highly subjective judgements, which can be easily contested by even more subjective objections and alternate judgements. Yet, this theory is appealing, it has become wildly popular and is even taught at schools (Ι remember being taught about it at primary school in Greece).

But, back to the main topic of the BBC story: will Chinese handwriting become obsolete any time soon because of the electronic age? A Chinese teacher interviewed by Andersen doubts it, and she offers the information that as a countermeasure the government has allotted ’10 min of every class just to handwriting.’ There are also school calligraphy clubs and spelling contests, which the reporter claims ‘are increasingly popular.’

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A spelling contest in Chinese TV (screen shot taken from the above BBC video)

And to the reporter’s question, whether Chinese characters and script could ever disappear, the teacher confidently gave a response that surely resonates with script users of multiple nationalities:

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(screen shot taken from the above BBC video)

The ‘grecs du roi’, an early Greek typeface hitting the streets

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91_002The Association of European Printing Museums (AEPM) is holding its annual conference between 11 and 14 May 2017 in Chania, Greece. One of the speakers, Georgios Matthiopoulos from the Technological Educational Institute of Athens, will present a paper entitled “The Grecs du roi meet early Cretan literature in a Street Art performance throughout Crete: a school project”.

An article in a local newspaper from Chania drew my attention to the conference; that and the fact that I had a number of unknown concepts in the title of the paper! So, it seems that Matthiopoulos put together a project for school children, in which he wanted to combine an early Greek typeface (‘grecs du roi’), with early Cretan literature (the period of blossom: 16th-17th cent AD) and graffiti, the modern street art form.

The typeface ‘grecs du roi’ was designed by Claude Garamont himself, the famous Parisian punch-cutter who gave his name to a series of typefaces still used in our digital world (Garamond fonts). Garamont apparently designed by order of the French king in 1541 punches of Greek letters to be used in the printing of books in Greek. He followed models and instructions of the royal calligrapher Angelo Vergezio, who came originally from Crete. His effort was to imitate hand-writing of the time, which however contained a lot of ligatures and alternate ways of spelling words, as the cursive version of any script would. It seems that the result was an elegant, much admired although complicated font, which came to be known as ‘grecs du roi’.

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A 1550 edition of the New Testament printed by use of ‘grecs du roi’ (source: typolexikon.de)

Recent research suggested the possibility that Garamont was not in fact the inventor of the typeface, instead they had been developed already by his master, Antoine Augereau, who allegedly had a strong knowledge of Greek and a solid education; it seems that this education caused Augereau his life, because he was burnt together with his books as a heretic by the Inquisition in 1534.

Regardless of who invented what, the ‘grecs du roi’ is a beautiful typeface and very recognizable as evidence of Renaissance early typography. I assume this is what inspired Matthiopoulos to plan a project that brought together this specific typeface, early Cretan literature (the poem of Erotokritos, a famous 17th cent Cretan poem) and school children. The children were called in to paint stenciled graffiti on the streets of Chania, the Cretan city where the conference will take place shortly. The graffiti are verses from Erotokritos.

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Learning Latin in West Philadelphia

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romanesA charter school in West Philadelphia named Boys’ Latin is offering compulsory courses in Latin, says an article in the WSJ.

“The traditional arguments for studying Latin are well known. More than half of English words have Latin roots, so students who learn Latin improve their vocabularies and linguistic skills. In addition, the discipline of studying Latin—the logic, the structure, the rigor—helps train young minds to think more clearly and systematically. All these arguments Mr. Hardy [the school’s chief executive officer] accepts and occasionally invokes himself. But for him Latin is also a way of addressing the most wretched fact of today’s Philly school system: Only 8% of young black men who graduate from one of the city’s public high schools will go on to a four-year college degree.”

And more arguments are listed in favor: because Latin “immediately raises expectations all around”; “you can’t fake it”, and “satisfaction … comes from [the] achievement when these boys learn it”; “partly it’s the school’s thing”, “it builds identity and esprit de corps.”; “it’s also what helps make Boys’ Latin attractive to the Philadelphia School Partnership, an influential group of donors whose mission is to get more of the city’s kids into great schools—and put more on the path to college.”

And the results? “Boys’ Latin is not without its critics, who point to so-so scores on state tests. Mr. Hardy argues that the scores, which have been rising, are still better than the alternatives for most young men in West Philly. For him the most important measure is that his students are getting their college degrees.”

Let’s see how things will evolve in the future.

PS1. As I was browsing through blog themes WordPress offers (it’s a new blog, so I’m trying out things), I noticed that blog templates are half in English and half in Latin.

PS2. To understand the image above, click here to see an excerpt from the “Life of Brian”, a 1979 Monty Pythons’ film.