Teaching numbers

By Dyske    July 27th, 2007

My daughter is 2.5 years old. I’m trying to teach her Japanese, but it’s not easy. The language one uses to speak to kids is actually quite different, and I’m not familiar with it. So, I have to watch other Japanese parents and learn how they speak to their kids. YouTube is quite handy for that purpose too. There are a lot of stuff for kids, some of which are interesting for me to watch as well. This one below teaches how to count to 10, but it’s deceptively complex. There are multiple levels of word-play. Each cartoon character presented has the letters used for a number.  For instance, “ba-na-na”: If you take aways “ba”, you are left with “na-na”, which means 7. As you can see, those bananas are battling. The English word “battle” is used commonly in Japanese as “ba-to-ru”. The last two syllables “to-ru” means to take away something. So, it could be interpreted as “take away ‘ba'”. If you were to do that from “ba-na-na”, you are left with “na-na” which is 7. In this manner, they go through all the numbers up to 10. I like the music too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdzSCv_p7QA

2 Responses

  1. Mary Whitsell says:

    July 28th, 2007 at 11:38 am

    Hello. I’ve just taken your Asian faces test (and scored only an 8), and what a great idea, for so many reasons. I only wish I’d known about your test when I lived in Japan; I would happily have recommended that several of my students take it. They insisted that there were huge differences between Japanese/Chinese/Korean people and that they could always tell who was which. I’d have loved to watch them take that test. I’ll bet a couple of them wouldn’t even have gotten 6.

    I’ve been teaching my kids Japanese too, as they both grew up in Japan and went to Japanese public schools. At first it was like pulling teeth teaching them; the older kid (whose Japanese is better than the younger’s) read through the Japanese translations of the first two Harry Potter books with me and it was sheer torture for both of us. But subsequently both kids discovered anime, then Visual Kei, and now I can’t get them to stop studying Japanese. Though ‘studying’ is not perhaps the right word…

    I loved what you wrote about prejudice and hate — and stereotypes. I liked your delivery person story and experienced something similar myself when I lived in Tokyo. I called to make reservations for a concert and the woman on the other end started speaking to me in Korean. It turned out that she was actually a Japanese woman studying Korean but she assumed that anyone who spoke broken Japanese at my level must be Korean. I was terribly flattered; I realized that my Japanese must really be getting better for someone to have confused me with a Korean.

  2. Karl Gookey says:

    July 29th, 2007 at 1:14 pm

    “JUUUUUUU!”

    Sorry, it’s catchy. If I was a kid, I’d love to be taught to count with that. It’d probably end up being one of those things that have their own little place in your memory. The place that everything instantly becomes “classic”, like Bill & Ben, or Banana-man.