Of course they don't have numbers!

You might not agree with my style, but I spend the first couple of months with a new class sort of "breaking" them. I don't argue, I don't scold, but I make a point of forcing them to question certain opinions and stereotypes they have. Besides being good in itself, I have found over the years that students who stick to the same old litany of truisms never actually improve at English too. My theory is simple: they never have to use their brains.

So people that immediately fall back on the "Japanese people are shy, Japan is a small country, foreigners are noisy, we love nature" mantra aren't actually having a conversation or putting their brain in gear. I don't insist people like my country or its politics or movies or whatever, but it just makes my job and my life much easier if I have a room full of people willing to accept something now, or to apply a little critical thought.

I really really can't emphasize enough how people who don't break this habit of just repeating truisms and headlines never progress in their English either. They might go to English lessons diligently for ten years, in fact that type often does, attendance counts for more that participation in their world-- but if you taught them on day one, continued for a year, left for ten years then came back and taught them again after ten years they'd still be right where you left them after a year of instruction. But people who are willing to reconsider their assumptions and recall later that something they heard on TV doesn't match with the facts- those people advance much more quickly as English speakers too. Someone should look into this.

So anyway I have a new class, and they still frequently do the following "must be Japan only" sonata:

Student A: Kirk-sensei, how do you say QKRGFRFGDSKU in English?

["QKRGFRFGDSKU" being a technical term like Hypoglycemia, a mythical beast like a gremlin without direct equivalent (how do you say Leprechaun in Japanese?), or maybe just a word that got garbled because the speaker was munching on crackers.]

Me: Sorry? Could you give me a hint? Is it an animal or a kind of sickness?

Student A: You know, QKRGFRFGDSKU. ...QKRGFRFGDSKU?

Me: Is it a law? Do people keep it in their home? Is it only for women?

Student B: Ah, of course, they don't have that in America.

Me: No, maybe we do, I just didn't understand the question. Please try again. Is there a simpler word for it?

Student A: Oh, they don't have it in America. Hmm, of course, ONLY JAPAN.

It's understandable to think that maybe only Japan has a high speed train, or charcoal ink drawings, but more often than not it's a much more mundane thing, like mosquitoes or fireflies, graduation ceremonies and so on. (The opposite happens too, like "Caterpillar company? What's that? We don't have earth moving equipment companies (like Kobelko and Komatsu) in Japan. We are small. Airports come out of the ground. 3M and DuPont make chemicals? Ooh, shocking. We don't have anything like that (Mitsubishi, Tooray, Fuji, et al) here because we like nature. Nylon grows on trees. The steel in our cars comes from recycled hamster tears."

So the one that I got the other day with the new class was: numerical columns.

That's right, the US couldn't possibly have columns or at least names for columns when writing ones, ten, hundreds. I didnt understand the Japanese word, so they proceeded to draw some lines and write a number like "367" and explain how "this column is tens"

It was a good explanation and I understood right away once they did so, but they took a lot of convincing to accept that in America (well in English or I imagine almost any language except for maybe some rain forest tribes) we are familiar with the terms.

In fact, not that I care, but I have a feeling that years ago in Japan there was less familiarity with the concept. True, the soroban has been around for a while, but traditional Japanese writing uses characters, not numbers, a bit like Roman numerals. It's easy to line up 23 + 14 but try doing that with XXIII + XIV -- you can't, that's why people all over the world use "arab" numbers.