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Maths in a foreign language | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4494 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes  Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 9 of 20 03 December 2013 at 11:22pm | IP Logged | ||
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. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| shk00design Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4231 days ago 747 posts - 1123 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin Studies: French | Message 10 of 20 03 December 2013 at 11:30pm | IP Logged | ||
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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. 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| alang Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 7008 days ago 563 posts - 757 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish | Message 11 of 20 04 December 2013 at 12:24am | IP Logged | ||
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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. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6490 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 12 of 20 04 December 2013 at 12:25pm | IP Logged | ||
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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.
3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| cacue23 Triglot Groupie Canada Joined 4086 days ago 89 posts - 122 votes Speaks: Shanghainese, Mandarin*, English Studies: Cantonese | Message 13 of 20 04 December 2013 at 4:58pm | IP Logged | ||
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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 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Fasulye Heptaglot Winner TAC 2012 Moderator Germany fasulyespolyglotblog Joined 5634 days ago 5460 posts - 6006 votes 1 sounds Speaks: German*, DutchC1, EnglishB2, French, Italian, Spanish, Esperanto Studies: Latin, Danish, Norwegian, Turkish Personal Language Map | Message 14 of 20 30 December 2013 at 6:00pm | IP Logged | ||
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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 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Luso Hexaglot Senior Member Portugal Joined 5848 days ago 819 posts - 1812 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, French, EnglishC2, GermanB1, Italian, Spanish Studies: Sanskrit, Arabic (classical) | Message 15 of 20 30 December 2013 at 7:16pm | IP Logged | ||
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For many people, mathematics is a foreign language.
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| s0fist Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4833 days ago 260 posts - 445 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: Sign Language, German, Spanish, French | Message 16 of 20 31 December 2013 at 12:32am | IP Logged | ||
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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). 1 person has voted this message useful |
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