A while back, my science teacher started us on an Astronomy Observation Lab. We were to go outside ten times to look at the moon and draw it. We were given a month to do a project. Spring break overlapped with the time given to do the lab.

My teacher said that if you were going on vacation during the spring break, you could just reorient your map while you were there so you could still do your homework. She said that one student had gone to Chicago and came back saying "I couldn't see the moon." But my teacher says that she's been to Chicago, and the moon is still there. "The moon is a big dude," said my teacher.

I wonder what makes people decide the genders of things. The Earth is called Mother Earth, and nature is called Mother Nature. But people say The Man in the Moon. Whose decision is it to determine the genders of things? I mean, all objects have a gender in French, and I'm curious about that too. There is kind of a way to say "it" in French, but mostly you would refer to "he" or "she". But in English we just refer to things as "it" so frequently. I suppose this is a trait that sets English apart?

One of my classmates mentioned something interesting to me. She says that when she reads Chinese, she just thinks of the Chinese words in her head, but when she reads French, she translates it to English in her mind. My mom says that when you practice a lot, you end up understanding automatically and don't need to translate to English. (When my mom was first learning English, she says she would translate it to Chinese in her head first, but now she can just think of the English words) But I, despite being so unskilled in Chinese, do this too. When I see the Chinese word for the number one (one of the only characters I can read! Yeah!) I think of the Chinese word for it, not "one". So is Chinese just different? Are languages spelled with symbols like this in comparison to languages with the same alphabet in English? That means the languages with English letters make me feel smarter, because I can translate it to English automatically in my head. XD

I was told a rather unsettling thing by someone. On my school trip to Yosemite National Park, we stopped at a town called Los Banos. I was told that it actually means something like "The Bathrooms". Imagine if you were saying that you ate in Los Banos and someone who understood Spanish walked by...

In history class, I and some other students had a presentation about Mormons, irrigation, and Mexican food. One of my group's members said the names of various foods in Spanish. The teacher later said that she pronounced them quite well and asked if she spoke Spanish. The girl said, "No." A classmate said, "But don't you take Spanish? So wouldn't you be able to speak it?" And the teacher said, "Taking Spanish class and being able to speak it are different matters."

I think that is true. People may be learning a language in school, but can they really speak it? I have noticed that sometimes students have trouble actually putting words together even if they know what the words mean, and that speaking the language out loud seems harder than writing it. I heard that you could really learn the language faster if you actually lived in the country of the language you wanted to learn. (My French teacher says we could learn a lot more in just a few months in France than what she could teach in a year because we would be "forced" to adapt to the country and learn French) I'd like to move to another country, experience something different, but I don't know when it will happen. (My mom has suggested having me move to France for a while and live with my aunt's family, but I feel it would be rather stressful with her rambunctious children)

Labels: bathroom, chicago, chinese, country, english, experience, foreign, french, gender, language, learning, los banos, moon, school, science, spanish, speaking, symbol, teacher, translation

Does it make sense to you? It didn't to me at first. I was doing my French homework today, and it said, "Moi, j'adore le saucisson. Avec du pain et du beurre, miam, miam!!" (It really did have two exclamation points. Talk about excited over food. Though of course, cuisine is one of the finer points of life, as I was watching the Food Network recently, The Next Iron Chef and stuff like that)

English translation: Me, I adore sausage. With bread and butter, yum, yum!

I tried it out in Google Translate just to be sure, and "miam, miam" means "yum, yum". Very interesting. Next time I go to France I'll see what kinds of things my cousins say when they're eating. (Funny, but the word for cousin - the female cousin, mind you, not the male - is pronounced like cuisine)

Oh, but I have been meaning to talk about Google Translate, and Wikipedia. I often use Google Translate if I can't figure out what a word is in French (luckily, they are often similar to English words, so you can guess at some of what you don't know). The teacher said not to use translators, because she says it's a machine and can't always figure out what you're trying to say. For instance, a student once tried to say he had turkey in his sandwich but he said the word for Turkey the country instead of the word for turkey the bird.

Still, despite that, it does work pretty well, as long as you compare it to another translator, or online dictionaries, and I've been able to figure out a lot that way. I guess some things work for some people. "One man's trash is another's treasure", shall I say.

Wikipedia is often scorned as well. Teachers don't want students to use it for their reports most of the time because, basically, anyone could edit the pages in Wikipedia. In fact, one time my history teacher had a student who was apparently dumb enough to want to try causing trouble, so the student went and changed a Wikipedia page. The teacher figured out what was going on because he remembered some of the information on the page and could tell that it wasn't what he had seen in the morning. However, I do hear that there are more serious people who are dedicated to Wikipedia who would probably fix something if it was messed up. So, I don't think you need to worry about Wikipedia pages being opinionated, unless it's a delicate topic. (I mean, something like politics.)

But you know, Wikipedia is actually the most accurate encyclopedia in the world. I heard that people have done studies and it is quite accurate and up to date. I can vouch for this. There is a Japanese singer named Ceui and she didn't have a Wikipedia page before, but one day, a few months ago, I was clicking about in Wikipedia, and discovered she did have a page! Wikipedia is updated much more quickly than an old, classic, book encyclopedia, because those get remastered maybe every few years. -_-;;

My language arts teacher displayed a scary, but still funny, side of herself today. We were talking about the eighth grade standards for the writing test we will take on behalf of the district (and maybe the whole state of California too?) later on this year. She said that there is a person who advises the language arts teacher, and so my teacher heard that there was an elementary school teacher who said to her students, "You can just write the way you speak." This is not encouraged, and my teacher said, "If I ever meet that teacher, I will challenge her to a cage match, and I will take her down!" with quite a bit of vigor. It was pretty amusing, but it was a bit intimidating too.

Speaking of which, it isn't always bad to have your writing seem like you're talking to someone. I know you shouldn't be using speaking slang like "gonna" and stuff like that, but I have seen books where the main character and/or narrator of the book actually acknowledges that there is a reader, as if the character of the book is aware that they're in a book. And if you've seen books that are written to be like diaries, then certainly they aren't written so formally. It really could depend on the situation, I suppose.

Labels: books, ceui, cousins, encyclopedia, food, french, google translate, language, miam, teacher, the next iron chef, translation, turkey, wikipedia, writing style, yum

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