my 3rd grader came home with this today from school, excited to show me how he’d written his name in Chinese. I had to gently explain to him that this is, uh… extremely Not Correct
See this is why with a lot of things I’m like “I swear it’s not our fault they literally teach us these things”
Going through a couple chapters of Remember the Kanji might be a fun lesson for third graders too
I remember feeling so proud when I realized that 吗 and 妈 both had a 马 in them and I finally figured something out about the language that wasn't just rote memorization.
Same feeling when I realized the symbol 女 exists in several "feminine" words like "she" or "mother"
I felt the same when I realized a lot of the words for women have 女 in them, like 妈妈 and 姐姐
Which now that I looked, 女人 is woman, so that definitely makes sense and I don’t know why it wasn’t explicitly stated when they started trying to teach me those characters
True leftists study radicals!
spoiler
(do they call them radicals in chinese or is that just for japanese?)
In like 5th grade we did a project where we'd "write our name in cuneiform" where it was just letter replacement. Not as offensive as this version with a modern language, but I remember being a kid and knowing that's not how the language worked (one symbol representing a concept, not a sound)
Another silly thing I remember from middle school is my teacher trying to demonstrate the "push-pull effect" (where immigrants are "pushed" from their home countries by poverty/war ect, and "pulled" to the US by opportunity) but she completely misunderstood the concept, so we simulated a debate between push and pull, with a group in the middle to represent the immigrants who can't decide which side to choose
"there are well-paying jobs available!" vs "your family at home is starving!" (Not a contradiction, the point was supposed to be that immigrants would move to make money for their family)
And the lesson was "so you see... it was very hard for them"
Idk how relevant this is but it's always stuck in my head
An important part of growing up, is learning to recognize all the weird shit you were taught as a child, and trying to continue your education beyond that. Generally I don't stress over whether my teacher taught me the correct stuff all of the time, because honestly, because at the very least they gave me a foundation to operate from. And now I spend my days using my education to post with all the good people and :LIB: people on this site. Which does occassionally teach you something useful.
I guess the irony of it is that I recognize the push-pull effect much better than if she just explained it properly all those years ago. Recognizing that my teacher is fallible and trying to learn without her was an important skill, and surely helped as I began to traverse the internet around that time
I thought they might have assigned similar sounding characters to each letter, or just did it at random. But doing it based on which characters vaugly look like which letters is so much more insulting. Also the font they chose for "Chinese Alphabet".
can't fucking believe that the woke liberal left is trying to get rid of faux cyrillic in schools to replace it with faux chinese smh my damn head
Oh new bit, post this to the hog trough websites and see if we can't get them squealing about educating our children with ARABIC NUMBERZ AND CHINESE LETTERS!!!
