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Sunday January 06, 2008

Umpires and cricket.

Over the preceding 5 days, Australia played India in a cricket match at the Sydney Cricket Ground (SCG) and while Australia won, the best summary I've seen of the 2nd test match is:

Caught Benson, Bowled Bucknor

Who are Benson and Bucknor? The two umpires appointed to adjudicate on decisions throughout the match. The umpires are appointed for the match by the International Cricket Council (ICC) and are from the countries of England and Jamaica respectively.

It is a great shame for any sport when the actions of the umpires and the decisions they make overshadow the talent and endevours of the players on the field. In Australia, football umpires are often lovingly referred to as White maggots. It appears we need to come up with an appropriate term for cricket umpires too.

As is often the case in life, people are prone to speculate about what if. The only conclusion that can be safely drawn, on reflection, is that if any particular decision is/was made is changed then everything that follows must be different. You cannot change individual events in life and expect all the others to be as they were. The joining together of events in space and time is known as the Butterfly Effect, about which a movie was made in 2004. If you haven't seen this movie, I'd recommend making the time to do so. Stop worrying about the past and focus on the present and future.

The teaching of foreign languages

During high school, I studied two very different foreign languages (French and Japanese) and in more recent times, I've been lucky enough to be in the right place and time to make some basic steps in another two very different languages: Czech and Chinese. But rather than compare the languages themselves, I'd like to reflect on how they get taught through looking at how the respective textbooks approach the problem.

The aim of learning French was quite simple: to make it possible for you to go there and speak the language as a tourist in order to achieve simple things - ask where something is, what the time is, how much, etc. Japanese was not taught in this manner but I no longer have those textbooks to examine how it was done (unfortunately the end of highschool was celebrated by some amount of book burning, much to my shame.)

When I look at the textbooks I have today for Czech and Chinese, there is similar disparity, to the point where the Czech textbooks look like they've been written for people who will need to use the language vs the Chinese textbooks that look like they're written for business people. How stark the difference is can be see in the first lesson: in the Chinese textbook, it talks about company names and what country the company comes from vs the Czech textbook is greetings, including how are you. The difference in themes continues into both books - beer/coffee appears in lesson 1 for Czech but lesson 4 for Chinese.

Does the differing approach make much difference? Yes - in a very short span of time (1 lesson), it is possible to learn enough Czech to go to a cafe/restaurant and ask for food/drink. It takes considerably more lessons with the Chinese textbook. And in reflection, the difference feels much like it did when learning French and Japanese. Why does this difference exist? I can't say. Perhaps it is cultural, I can't say, as I don't know enough about the Chinese culture to know the significance of what is taught early on. There are no such problems with Czech - in a country that has some quite excellent beers, learning the Czech word for beer is very important, probably like wine for French.

In closing, I'll mention one other prominent difference between the two textbooks: use of the language you're learning. In the Czech textbook, there's an table at the front that tells you what various words mean in English. In every chapter, those words are used in place of the English words for "Read", "Write", "Listen", etc. The Czech textbook forces you to learn Czech in order to use it and uses it throughout. The Chinese textbook makes no such attempt as even at the end of the book, the word "Sentences" is still there in English at the beginning of the chapter. While I don't recall the approach Japanese textbooks took, from memory the French ones did approach things from the same angle as the Czech one does. One is given to wonder if there is some deeper cultural difference in the way people view Asian languages should be taught vs European languages.

Addendum

I suppose I should add a note here about which method I prefer. Without a doubt, the European approach for teaching language is vastly superior to that I've experienced for Asian languages. Granted there is a new form of writing to learn with Asian languages that can be a steep learning curve, and with Chinese, tones, but then there is verb tenses with the Romantic/Latin/Slavic languages and then the modal twist as well (of which Czech is the worst with 7 cases.)