ダニエルの冒険

We did two tests this week on Chapter 9 of our textbook, New Approach. In the first, I got 5/12, which is officially the lowest result I’ve ever gotten in any Japanese test ever in my life. Today we did the second test and the teacher looked through them and said 「みんな、ちょっと・・・！」 (“Everyone… hold on a minute…!!”) and handed them back to us to correct them during class. People didn’t do so well in it. I got about 4/12 by my marking.

I believe the problem is that this chapter has a lot of grammar which is either the same or very close to what we’ve studied before a long time ago. So long ago that it’s just part of our Japanese language and not something our brains have flagged for “being learned right now”. So when there’s a question asking me complete a sentence using the grammar we’re studying now, I just can’t see what it is that it wants from me.

Another problem, I believe, is that one of our teachers is horrendously bad at explaining things. There are so many things that she’s done to make the whole class confused. When she tried to explain “~ or more” (〜以上) and “~ or less” (〜以下), she got it totally wrong and not only massively failed with explaining it, but even when she did get it, her understanding of logic failed so when a negative entered a sentence, such as “I won’t sell this for less than 1000 yen”, she couldn’t figure out what’s the minimum amount that the speaker would sell “this” for.

A week later, we asked another teacher about it and she explained it within 1 minute, drawing a quick diagram on the board and saying two sentences. The first teacher had the class arguing, everyone with their dictionaries out trying to make sense of this grammar point. Poor Kellie, who was sitting beside me at the time, finally made sense of what the teacher was trying to say, and managed to learn it, only to be told “sorry, I made a mistake last week and taught it wrong. Here’s how it actually works,” and she had to re-learn the lot.

In case you’re interested in what the problem was, it’s whether or not the value stated is included in the range. That is, “1000 or more” means 1000 and all bigger numbers or only all bigger numbers, without 1000. In English we understand it to be included, and it makes sense because of the meaning of “or”, but the word “or” doesn’t really exist that simply in Japanese, and in fact there’s no instance of a Japanese version of the word “or” in this grammar point. A direct translation of the characters would be “compared to that, above” (the first character in 以上 means より). So “compared to 1000, above” is just about what the characters tell you when you use 1000 as your number.

It turns out that for both 以上 (~ or above) and 以下 (~ or below), it’s included, like in the English “~ or above/below” (as opposed to “more than ~”/”less than ~”). What we were taught the first day is something along the lines of it’s included for when it’s above but not for when it’s below, meaning 以上 is “~ or above” and 以下 is “less than ~”.

Actually, think about “over 18s” in English for a moment. If you look at this simply, it actually says “over 18″, which as a mathematical predicate would be “? > 18″. I suppose if you define the age 18 to be at your 18th birthday, the day when you’ve been outside of the womb for exactly 18 years, then any day after that is actually “over” 18 years time.

Are you adequately confused? Now you know how I felt in the class where that was explained to me.