h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

>> I have a soft spot for Trudeau. He's the only national leader ever to have bought me a cup of coffee. <<

And you're in good company. He once paddled a canoe to Cuba to meet Fidel Castro.

Perhaps his greatest social coup was firing a gun off at a Liberal party caucus meeting to prove to everyone there that they weren't really dead. If someone tried that today they'd be gunned down by covert CIA operatives before they could unholstered their weapon.


~jwf~

It was at an arts cinema club in Odderwah, during the interval of Ghandi.

The next day a newspaper gossip column commented that both the PM and his date had got in half price - he as a Senior Citizen, she as a school student. Chapeau!

He climbed Mt Athabasca on his 70th birthday, didn't he?

>> He climbed Mt Athabasca on his 70th birthday, didn't he? <<

Not sure. Maybe he only had it renamed. But his ghost was recently observed at the Rolling Stones concert in Moncton, tongue hanging out as if he hoped someone might buy him a coffee. Or a Cuban cigar.


~jwf~

It's interesting how in Spanish there is often only one lexeme (=word) for a kinship term of both genders, and the gender difference comes only through inflection:

brother = hermano
sister = hermana

grandfather = abuelo
grandmother = abuela

uncle = tío
aunt = tía

Yep. That's all I have to say for now.

I may have mentioned this before:

A Zimbabwean friend once asked me to clarify the word 'Cousin' to him. I explained that it might be, for example, the son of your father's brother. 'So it's the same as a brother, then!' he said. In his culture, there would be no difference in relationship between the two. In fact...his own son was raised by his cousin/brother, and this was not regarded as unusual.

'Or,' I explained, 'It could be the children of your mother's sister'...but he didn't have a particular word for so distant a relative.

Testing...

And giving up. Stupid bugs.

But they both worked. I had trouble posting this afternoon.

Mainly for Aina, being our tame Finn...but of general interest.

First a (long...sory!) pre-amble: In another thread, we've touched on changing approaches in the UK in how dyslexia is managed in schools. The current position is that if parents fight hard enough, they can have their dyslexic child 'statemented', after which schools are required to give them special support such as computers, teaching assistants, etc. Naturally, assertive, educated middle-class parents are most effective at this.

Recently there has been some controversy started by an academic who has pointed out that, while dyslexia certainly exists, a) it cannot be reliably distinguished from 'ordinary' reading difficulties and b) in any case, the most effective interventions are the same in either case. So...why not stop wasting money on statementing and devote it to providing assistance to all children with reading difficulties. Some parents have taken offence at this: a label of dyslexia means 'My child's not just thick'. Besides...British education has always had a tradition of giving most resources to the brightest children, rather than to those who need additional support.

Then...(getting nearer to the point)...I recently heard a radio programme about Finnish schools. Finland has the world's highest literacy rate. Yet children don't start school until age seven and aren't encouraged to read before then. But everyone seems to lern to read within their first year. And everyone learns 3 or 4 foreign languages! What really showed the contrast was when they interviewed a girl in the remedial class of a school in a relatively deprived area. She had the usual moans about how school was boring and rubbish. But she moaned in English!

Arriving at the point at last ...leaving aside the obvious questions such as 'How come you Finns are so clever?' and 'Do you have any plans for world domination?' and 'Why don't you move somewhere warmer and less dark?'...What do Finns do about dyslexia?

>>But they both worked.<<

But it wouldn't post my actual post. Like it was allergic to those specific words.

I don't know that much about dyslexia in Finland, but as far as I can tell, we have the same kind of system as you do. You get a diagnosis, and with that special support (extra classes are one form of this) and softer grading of exams (at least in your mother tongue). It might be that in the high school final exams you also get more time.

If your language was written phonetically instead of the diabolic mess that is your current ortography, you also might learn to read in a year no problem.

My daughter taught herself to read English in six months. She started at 3 years and 9 months, when my second daughter was born. When she was 4 years and 3 months old, she read a 90-page book (The Twits by Roald Dahl). She still more than 10 years later gets caught out by the pronunciation of some words.

>>She started at 3 years and 9 months<<

and wow!

>>gets caught out by the pronunciation of some words<<

That's what must be really annoying for English-speaking children learning to read, the irregularity. The experience is probably lighter and more motivating for Finnish-speaking children because the logic of spelling is clearly visible from the beginning. The few irregularities that Finnish spelling does have - jonnekkin is spelled 'jonnekin', sydämmessä is spelled 'sydämessä' - many children keep making mistakes on those up til their teens and maybe even longer.

>>everyone learns 3 or 4 foreign languages<<

Äh, no they don't. Four would be considered a lot, and many people have just two.

Ha! As you will have seen on this sight, many English adults never master spelling. I myself have, strangely, been getting worse over the last couple of years and have more and more mental blocks over certain words. However...spelling is no great sign of intellect: even Microsoft products can do it. I'm sure that the people who rant about declining standards in spelling are the descendents of those who complained of declining skills in mammoth hunting.

Starting early to read and write isn't that unusual in Britain (or, presumably, Ireland)...although a whole Roald Dahl book at that age is still impressive. Myself, I remember writing letters to Santa before I went to school (I have a vivid memory of shouting into the kitchen to ask my bored mother how to spell each word). When I started school, we played this bizarre game where we learned to associate A with Apple, B with Boat etc. I already knew the letters - learning the arbitrary choice of pictures on the chart was the tricky bit. Similarly, my own children could read before school but were given reading material way below their ability. My son has temporarily abandoned books for Pokemon (although it's amazing the vocabulary that's teaching him!) My daughter devours novels, but is still given pathetically boring reading homework.

Oh...and last night she was teaching my 3-years 4-months son to write. And a damn good job he was making of it, too!

So...this sort of thing isn't encouraged in Finland?



It might be mildly amusing to compare notes on what we were taught the various letters stood for. A for Apple, B of Ball/Boat, C for Cat...Y for Yacht (that was a weird one!).

Or is it A for 'Orses, B for Lamb, C for Miles...M for Sema, N for Hoxha...S for Rantzen...

What do they stand for in Finnish? (With translations, please)

It might be that learning to read and write doesn't need to be so actively encouraged as it's all so much easier in Finnish. I mean, it's considered a good thing if a child learns to read before starting school and I'd say maybe about half of them do, but it's not a requirement in any way. It sounds to me like it's a bigger deal in Britain than what it is here. It's sort of given that a child will learn to read sooner or later, so even if literacy is higly valued, why stress over it?

I was promised some sort of prize for learning to read, and I did actively study books to understand how the whole thing works. On the other hand, a lot of children just sort of pick it up, from the backs of milk cartons or so.

Yes! You're quite right! That's what we do as a nation...we stress over literacy. The government has made it a big deal, with compulsory literacy hours in primary schools.

Could this all be just an artefact of our bizarre othography? Cor!

Now we need to find a Chinese person to compare and contrast...

Most clinical psychologists and behavioral scientists agree that children reach the 'age of reason' somewhere around the age of six or seven years. That is to say, they begin to think original thoughts, to engage in independent queries and forecasts. They begin to understand the subtler (less ipso-facto) factors of life, such as duplicity, irony, metaphor, opinion, tolerance and other strange places and spaces beyond their tiny, ego-centric, matter-of-fact worlds of the here and now.

To train a child to read and write while they are still in the infantile 'monkey see / monkey do' stage of development is cruel and counter-productive to their development. They simply do not have the intellectual capacity to appreciate what writing is or what reading can do.

Am I kidding? No.
Am I deadly serious about this issue? Yes.

Forcing children to read or write before they can think independently will bring about the downfall of our culture. Because they are introduced to it before they can understand it, literacy will always be problematical for them. They will have to learn it by rote ("a memorizing process using routine or repetition, often without full attention or comprehension" - that belies the nature and function of literacy!) and they will stumble painfully over its vagaries and only grow angry at its mysteries and apparent contradictions.

They will come to look upon it and use it as they would any other tool or toy, too complex for them to master with young hands. They will carry with them their entire lives, annoyance and frustration and a begrudging antipathy toward literacy, never knowing the joys or beauties of a well-crafted or properly spelled sentence.

While there will always be 'prodigies' in every field of human activity it is still generally true of our species that some things just cannot be properly understood or embraced until the mind or body is mature enough to deal with them.

Yes sex can be forced on those who have not reached puberty and who have no self-directed inclination to experience it, just as reading and writing can be forced upon children still too young to appreciate what writing really represents, what reading can do for the soul and the imagination or where print technology fits into our cultural evolution. Once all that is lost, we are too.

The Finns have got it right!


~jwf~

I disagree completely with you, ~jwf~. Teaching our children to read is the single most useful thing that we can do for them. Everything else in our modern language-based society depends on it.

But jwf isn't arguing that we don't, is he? Merely that there may be disadvantages if it's rushed.

Sometimes it's useful to look wider than our own cultural experience, to question our assumptions and think a little about why we do things. Take another example: Speech acquisition. We also make a big deal of this...we think it's important to spend time with our children, mouthing words at them: 'Look! An Apple. A-pple'. We praise their stumbling efforts. We think it's amazingly clever when they come out with a big word or string together a complex sentence.

The Khoi-San peoples of the Kalahari would find this bizarre. To them, language is something that children will absorb automatically, simply by being in the company of adults. They still manage to grow up into competent speakers, and indeed have a rich oral culture. On the other hand...they believe that babies have to be taught to sit up, supporting them in a seated position with mounds of earth until - obviously as a result - they learn to do it for themselves. We don't do that. Our babies just suddenly surprise us. (And it's a moment of both joy and relief. Now you can put the buggers down on the floor when you need both hands free).

(This example was plagiarised from Stephen Pinker, btw)

This is not to say that there aren't other benefits in spending quality time with one's tot and a book about a Gruffalo - but maybe the early parental role in reading is somewhat overblown. An interesting consideration, given that the UK government likes to blame literacy problems on lack of parental involvement. There may be some truth in that - but that's not to say that the difference cannot be made up by schools.

There's an awful lot of conflicting "information" floating around about literacy. I've heard that Ireland has one of the highest rates of literacy in the Western world, and also that it has one of the lowest.

I've heard that Japan has the highest literacy rate in the world, and also that to be considered literate in Japan, you only need to know the names of the letters of the alphabet. No doubt, all cobblers.