しゅくだいができません…

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Ethnography: Japanese Education System

I found the videos on education interesting, especially the piece where the science teacher was talking about the children having to grab the learning for themselves so they learn how to think, instead of the learning and the knowledge being plopped down on them from outside. As a former science teacher, I know how hard it is to get children to think about experiment designs and hypotheses and alternative reasons for why they got those results and that not everything is as simple as they are told it is.  Of course, a lot of the time in the school system, teachers want you to swallow large amounts of information without question and be able to regurgitate it on command, rather than actually think about it, due to the sheer amount of material that you have to cover, whether it is history or geography, or even maths*, which the Greeks viewed as the very foundation of teaching and learning (it is the root of the word - there’s an old Greek saying “παθαματα μαθαματα” - pathamata mathama...
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Duolingo gets worse (two peeves in one!)

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The new interface has particles attached to words a lot of the time… but they have attached them to the front of the next word, not the word they belong with/are marking… OK, if it is a transitive verb, you could argue that the を that goes on the verb’s object* is only there because of the type of verb it is**, so it should be on the front of the verb, but… Sugawara sensei drilled us endlessly that if we really absolutely desperately must pause after a word, to gather our thoughts or whatever, if we were going to pause after a word, to say the particle first and then pause, so particles obviously belong with the word that comes before them, the word they mark; &  Some verbs are complicated enough that they can be generating multiple particles - verbs to give and to receive tend to generate に &/or から as well as the を particles, for just one example; &  You can have other words after that を or が particle and before the verb, like adverbs, or numbers and counters and ...
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Schrödinger's Japanese…

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Photo by  Jelleke Vanooteghem  on  Unsplash For anyone thinking that I am saying that Schrödinger is Japanese, it could not be further from the truth. I'm referring to the state where two opposing or paradoxical things are true at once until they are examined...   In this case, I was at home, sitting on the couch, and I heard my wife approach the front door and start struggling with her keys to try to get the door open. So, I leapt to my feet, and called out 「ちょうとまってください！」as I dashed towards the door to help her.   I realised that I had been studying Japanese too much, because I had called out to wait a little please in Japanese without thinking about it, to someone who doesn't speak Japanese... It had the desired effect anyway, as my wife heard me call out and figured out that I was heading to help her.   It is Schrödinger's Japanese though because I also realised later that I had used ください, not くれませんか, which I should have used, as I was s...
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