Someone explain to me why the stroke order for the Kanji for Left and Right is not the same on the first two strokes. I find that incredibly annoying, particularly since the Kanji dictionary on my smartphone didn't understand when I put them in reverse.
Someone explain to me why the stroke order for the Kanji for Left and Right is not the same on the first two strokes. I find that incredibly annoying, particularly since the Kanji dictionary on my smartphone didn't understand when I put them in reverse.
My experience from Chinese is that stroke order rules seem really obnoxious when you first learn them but eventually make sense and make your life easier. Although Chinese uses the same characters for left and right as Japanese does, and we learned you draw the horizontal line first for both.
I have Heisig's book myself (though the german edition) and I am not a big fan of it really. While his idea presenting Kanji by the radicals, then building a large number of Kanji out of those radicals seems reasonable at first, it leads to the fact that trivial and widely useful Kanji are learned late (e.g. the Kanji for "entering" consists of two strokes, but is placed as #779 in his book), while complicated Kanji that are probably of little use for beginners are learned very early (e.g. Request and Tides have like 16 strokes each and are #135 and 141 respectively). That his entire book also doesn't give a single pronunciation or example of use for the Kanjis make it even more annoying.
Anyway, what you posted isn't really an explanation. It's just a statement that yes, it can happen that they are reversed, but no rhyme or reason when it happens or why.
True enough (re: non-explanation and ordering). There probably is a reason, but it's probably fairly old and arbitrary. While it is frustrating that Vol. 1 & 3 don't give any readings, I agree that giving them might not be helpful since, to the beginner, a kanji and it's reading in a certain word is hard to figure out.
While true, how a concept is transmitted through speech is in my opinion a more integral part of a language than how it is transmitted by writing. And thus my displeasure with Heisig, as at least the first volume alone fails in actually teaching someone japanese, at least the first volume alone. Maybe that isn't what the book is set out to do, after all it's just supposed to help "remembering the Kanji", but that isn't really why people would seek out the book in the first place, including myself.
All in all, while Heisig's approach is novel, one of which I was impressed by in the beginning, I don't think it is a very practical one.
Maybe not the most practical, but it is very useful as a first step. I know several people who have become near-fluent after using it as a starting point, and after finishing Vol. 1, I've started reading, looking up pronunciation as I come across new words (I can usually suss out gist before that though, which is helpful). It gave me a concrete goal to shoot for and that really helped a lot. And while it might not be organized optimally, it certainly makes more sense than learning them in the same order as Japanese kids get them in school.
Heisig aside, are you using Anki or some other spaced repetition software? It's incredibly helpful.
Yeah, I use Anki. It's my primary learning tool at the moment for the time I can dedicate to it. I would like to take a course some time, but unfortunately there aren't any currently offered where I live.
I'm considering double majoring in Electrical Engineering and Applied Mathematics. I'm talking to advisers about feasibility and graduation and everything, but I was wondering what you guys had to say about the usefulness of an Applied Mathematics degree to an electrical engineer. Will it make me stand out as an applicant? Will it teach me skills that I will likely use in a career? Will it be worth a small hit to my GPA from the greater course load?
I'm not in that field, but the EE alone pretty much tells me you can do the math for the applicable jobs. If you are really excited about taking that additional math coursework for intrinsic reasons though, go for it.
I'm not in that field, but the EE alone pretty much tells me you can do the math for the applicable jobs. If you are really excited about taking that additional math coursework for intrinsic reasons though, go for it.
That's what I was thinking. EE should include all the math I need, ideally. I'll probably just end up minoring, but I guess I'll see what the advisers say.
I'm considering double majoring in Electrical Engineering and Applied Mathematics. I'm talking to advisers about feasibility and graduation and everything, but I was wondering what you guys had to say about the usefulness of an Applied Mathematics degree to an electrical engineer. Will it make me stand out as an applicant? Will it teach me skills that I will likely use in a career? Will it be worth a small hit to my GPA from the greater course load?
Well, I had to take some Applied Math courses while working towards an EE degree at my college. There certainly are a fair number of differential equations and such in EE, best I can remember it, so it certainly wouldn't hurt. The extra mathematical knowledge might be useful if you're going into bleeding edge EE research though.
The difference between a 30 and a 36 is pretty small. The difference between a 32 and a 36 is practically negligible. Scoring around a 24 puts you above the vast majority of people.
My high school was pretty poop. We had a few good teachers but not many. One of which assigned us a trigonometry question which we all had difficulty with, asked her about it, and she couldn't figure it out ಠ_ಠ.
Standardized tests only measure how well you can take standardized tests.
Which is a good indicator of certain skills in certain contexts.
The way my college explained it is that yes, they do figure standardized test scores into their admissions decisions, but it was relatively low down the priority list of things they look at. They much prefer looking at your actual academic performance at your school, extra-curricular activities, and so on. Presumably most reasonable colleges also work this way.
My high school was pretty poop. We had a few good teachers but not many. One of which assigned us a trigonometry question which we all had difficulty with, asked her about it, and she couldn't figure it out ಠ_ಠ.
Reminds me of when I took some time off from college. At the time, you only needed two years of college to become a substitute teacher in Massachusetts (not sure if it's still the case), and my uncle, a high school math teacher, suggested that I sub as due to my engineering coursework, I had more than enough mathematical knowledge to substitute a class in high school math and be more than just a glorified babysitter.
Needless to say, I never subbed a high school math class. There was even one time when my uncle had to take a day off for jury duty or something along those lines and when he called in to take the day off, he specifically requested that I be assigned to his classroom. They instead assigned me to the classroom next door, which wasn't even a math class.
FWIW, my uncle IMHO was overall a really good math teacher until he retired, but unfortunately the way things were set up made it hard to keep some of his skills sharp. He probably had more mathematical knowledge going into teaching than most high school math teachers since he was originally an electrical engineering major in college (he still has his old slide rule!) who later switched to education. However, 20+ or so years of the school only having him teach introductory algebra and geometry made his other mathematical skills rusty such that he really had to cram like crazy when he was assigned pre-calculus and trigonometry classes as he was approaching retirement. We both felt it would've been beneficial to all the math teachers if they periodically rotated which math classes they thought in order to help keep all their skills sharp.
Standardized tests only measure how well you can take standardized tests.
Which is a good indicator of certain skills in certain contexts.
Just earlier today, actually, I solved a real-world math problem that sounds almost exactly like something off the math SATs.
I'm currently working on setting up reports with a new print queue system at work. This morning I got a department report from the system that said last week, 46 pages were printed for a total of $19.03. For testing purposes, I originally set up the system to charge exactly $1 per page. In the middle of last week, however, I changed the cost to a new value of $0.07 per page, so some pages were printed at $1, the rest were printed at $0.07.
How many pages were printed at $1, how many at $0.07?
Well she only taught trigonometry so she should have known it like the back of her hand. She was also easily one of the worst teachers we had at the school. Our other math teachers actually weren't bad. As much as I liked our computer teacher he didn't know shit about most computer related stuff. Most of our English teachers were pretty bad too. Our best teachers were the ones that either didn't first get an education degree or had work other than being a teacher before being a teacher. Our chemistry teacher was an incredibly successful biochemist before he retired and decided to teach high school chemistry because he was bored.
Comments
Anyway, what you posted isn't really an explanation. It's just a statement that yes, it can happen that they are reversed, but no rhyme or reason when it happens or why.
All in all, while Heisig's approach is novel, one of which I was impressed by in the beginning, I don't think it is a very practical one.
Heisig aside, are you using Anki or some other spaced repetition software? It's incredibly helpful.
2005 ACT score distribution. That says a lot about our schools. You guys here are all pretty smart. ;^)
Needless to say, I never subbed a high school math class. There was even one time when my uncle had to take a day off for jury duty or something along those lines and when he called in to take the day off, he specifically requested that I be assigned to his classroom. They instead assigned me to the classroom next door, which wasn't even a math class.
FWIW, my uncle IMHO was overall a really good math teacher until he retired, but unfortunately the way things were set up made it hard to keep some of his skills sharp. He probably had more mathematical knowledge going into teaching than most high school math teachers since he was originally an electrical engineering major in college (he still has his old slide rule!) who later switched to education. However, 20+ or so years of the school only having him teach introductory algebra and geometry made his other mathematical skills rusty such that he really had to cram like crazy when he was assigned pre-calculus and trigonometry classes as he was approaching retirement. We both felt it would've been beneficial to all the math teachers if they periodically rotated which math classes they thought in order to help keep all their skills sharp.
I'm currently working on setting up reports with a new print queue system at work. This morning I got a department report from the system that said last week, 46 pages were printed for a total of $19.03. For testing purposes, I originally set up the system to charge exactly $1 per page. In the middle of last week, however, I changed the cost to a new value of $0.07 per page, so some pages were printed at $1, the rest were printed at $0.07.
How many pages were printed at $1, how many at $0.07?
Also, I just did that problem in my head while going off to take a piss.