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Maths in a foreign language

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tarvos
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 Message 9 of 20
03 December 2013 at 11:22pm | IP Logged 
emk wrote:
I'm taking an online statistics course through Coursera from an
engineering school in France. The first two weeks have been a good challenge—there's so
much specialized mathematical terminology, basic stuff, that I just don't know in
French. How do you read summations (the kind with capital sigma)? Variables with
subscripts? Powers?

Fortunately, a lot is quite obvious from context, especially if since I already know
some of the math. But still, I'm glad I can rewind the lectures and turn on subtitles
when things get tricky.

But I'm pretty sure if you take several semesters of math classes in another language,
you'll have no trouble mastering the necessary terminology. It's the usual problem: The
upper levels of a language are endless, and natives have a lifetime to learn the topics
which interest them. Fortunately the human brain, even the adult human brain, can soak
up new terminology for an already-known subject terrifyingly quickly.


This is what students were given when they first entered the bilingual stream and were
told "your maths classes will be in English". A list of vocabulary for all the
specialized terminology.

Within months it was fine.
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shk00design
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 Message 10 of 20
03 December 2013 at 11:30pm | IP Logged 
I read a post before doing math in some languages is easier than others, especially basic arithmetics. In Asian
languages like: Chinese, Japanese, Korean, etc. they have a straightforward way of counting numbers.

For example: here is 1-10 in Chinese -> 一二三四五六七八九十
For eleven you put the character 十 for 10 in front and combine it with a 一 for one. To get up to 20 you would
have: 十一, 十二, 十三, 十四, 十五, etc.
For a number like 80 you have: 八十. For 80 up to 90 you'd have: 八十一, 八十二, 八十三, 八十四, 八十五, etc. If you
do it in French you have: quatre-vingt which is essentially the French for a 4 and a 20. And for 90 you'd
have: quatre-vingt-dix which is a 4, a 20 and a 10 together. In Chinese it is just 九十 (the char. for 9 next to
char. for 10) which is simpler.

It is like doing math by Roman numerals which is very cumbersome. For 80 you'd have LXXX (L for 50 followed by
three Xs for 10) and 90 you'd have XC (C for 100 and X for 10 so you'd have 100 less 10).

For science however, a language like Chinese does run into problems because many of the original terms are
derived from Greek or Latin. So translating them into Chinese is often done phonetically the character
combinations don't make sense. To get different terms in your head would require more memorizing than in
another language like English.

Personally I tend to do math in Chinese and science in English.
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alang
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 Message 11 of 20
04 December 2013 at 12:24am | IP Logged 

I saw in university many foreign students and English was not their mother tongue. I
believe all subjects are taught in English. Every class new vocabulary terms are
presented. I find it difficult as a native English speaker, I cannot imagine how hard
it is for former ESL students or people that barely passed a test like I.E.L.T.S. with
lack of English exposure. Some do get the help of a tutor and if lucky a tutor, that
speaks their mother tongue.

I personally suggest to look over books on math and other subjects, in a target
language, as you are using L2 to refresh something old and learn something new. This is
why I bought the three Spanish math books from Aurelio Baldor. I have novels in
Esperanto, a marketing for business in French and a book on Brazilian films in
Portuguese. It maintains and improves, which is a goal of using the acquired languages.
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Iversen
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 Message 12 of 20
04 December 2013 at 12:25pm | IP Logged 
I haven't read advanced math books in the majority of my languages, but I can't see why it should be worse than reading about grammar or computers. The problem is simple calculus, and the reason that simple calculus is a problem is that numbers aren't drilled into you like other language elements. An why? Because numbers - especially large numbers - often are written as numbers and not as words, and if you see an aritmetical task it will almost always be written with numbers and symbols, not formulated as a report in words about the way you make the calculation.
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cacue23
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 Message 13 of 20
04 December 2013 at 4:58pm | IP Logged 
I've had the majority of my math education in English, so it's not like I can't do calculations in English. But one thing weird though, I can't possibly recite the value of Pi in English without mentally switching the numbers to Chinese, since when I was little my Dad taught me (just for the heck of it) to recite it to the 100th decimal place in Chinese.

Also I can't do calculations in French. I always think it's because I'm just not comfortable enough with French though.

Edited by cacue23 on 04 December 2013 at 5:15pm

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Fasulye
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 Message 14 of 20
30 December 2013 at 6:00pm | IP Logged 
SCHOOL MATHEMATICS - MULTILINGUAL POSSIBLE?

Some weeks ago I decided to do some extra "brain-workout" besides my language learning and my daily dosis of Lumosity games (= 3 brain games). My choice fell on revising school mathematics. University mathematics would be on a too high level for me, but with school mathematics I had good experiences as a child and a teenager.

The library of Düsseldorf has a lot mathematic training books for pupils of different grades, so I go there before my Danish course lessons to make copies of 2-3 units per week. I have never in my life done mathematics in a different language than German. Not even in Dutch. I would love to read the explanations which are presented before the training exercises in a different language than German.

With my Norwegian Skypie (one of his university subjects was mathematics) I already had a German - Norwegian exchange of algebra terminology. This was really fun for me! I will continue asking him from time to time to translate some German maths terminology into Norwegian and he is also curious about how these features are called in German.

Fasulye

Edited by Fasulye on 30 December 2013 at 7:23pm

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Luso
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 Message 15 of 20
30 December 2013 at 7:16pm | IP Logged 
For many people, mathematics is a foreign language.
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s0fist
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 Message 16 of 20
31 December 2013 at 12:32am | IP Logged 
Honestly, when I came to the US, translating math and science knowledge into English was one of the easiest parts of learning a language. There's a limited standardized vocabulary and (at least of I-E languages) it seems to be largely universal (latin based).

Nowadays, I've not kept up with science and math in my native Russian as much as I have in English. But even though I now know more science/math in English, it's rarely a problem to translate any of it into Russian when I need to do so. Softer sciences like psychology are a bit harder but still largely based in Latin terminology. Names of plants/animals/rocks/materials/etc are a nightmare though IMHO, unless you're expert at actual Latin(?).
Fortunately, English is the lingua franca of most STEM disciplines anyway, past a certain level.

And although I'm not yet at a great level in any of my L2s, any time I browse wikipedia in Spanish or French, science/math pages are the easiest. Though, fyi, it's not a very large sample for me and I haven't tried it in German at all. I imagine it would be a lot harder for languages with little common vocabulary (like Japanese, Mandarin, etc).


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