Here in Japan I often hear stories about kids raised bilingual being put into special needs classes because some schools consider it a cognitive impairment. Since my family lives abroad, I would like to teach my kids english at home and only use it in private settings, but feels weird having to hide something like that (also, half kids are sort of "expected" to speak english anyway).
Sounds like you may need to find a school that does not consider it a cognitive impairment, but you really should speak your native tongue to your children regardless.
> Here in Japan I often hear stories about kids raised bilingual being put into special needs classes because some schools consider it a cognitive impairment.
This sounds more like the Japanese being... Japanese. And not in the good sense of the word.
It happened to me some time ago but a bit different: I made an anagram with my last name + first name and then I tried to create several online accounts with it. I was registering a discord account but turns out part of one word in the anagram had an offensive term from the 50s that I wasn't aware of and btw it was discriminatory of my own race! so I felt bad for having an outdated kind of racist new mail address.
There was a recent bug fixed, specifically on YouTube, due to ad-blocking causing a constant loop fetching and reloading an icon or something to that end, I believe - it was fixed in a recent release.
I suspect that was what you were seeing, and if so, updating should have addressed it.
My Japanese PM from three years ago had a case of extreme aizuchi. He would say hai every three to four of my words, made me think -is he really listening to what I’m saying?
a common account registration pattern in Japan involves presenting a QR code containing a mailto link. The user scans it, sends an empty mail (the details for the subject are already in the mailto link) and a reply comes up with a temporary user. The user can then define a username or password. Sometimes this pattern creates the username and password randomly.
might be helpful for beginners. after learning Japanese for a while I've developed some "tastes" (I don't know how to put it). reading the sample explanations on your website, writing Japanese vocabulary in romaji feels wrong. I'd go for having it in hiragana for simplicity (bunsetsu jars...)
I don't know how useful the -kanji situated in english context- would be. in my experience having the Japanese context is way better to learn kanji, once one has learned enough vocabulary.
The kanji origin story (with the proto-kanji, chinese writing, etc) might be better for advanced courses (is it available for all kanji on your book?)
I'd try to avoid having native language "crutches" as much as possible.
I've studied Japanese for 10 years and would never recommend any material that uses romaji. Hiragana takes only a few weeks to get familiar with, and avoids mixing up Japanese pronounciation with English.
I don’t think Google’s AI is close to being sentient. Being able to generate “convincing” phrases from prompts is not that relevant to judge whether it is “conscious” or not. As a simple elimination game I would propose a series of word games: explain basic rules and see if it gets it right. Explain mistakes and see if it can learn on the go. A sentient AI with the intelectual level to claim “being afraid of being turned off” can surely learn a couple rules for a kid’s game. If after that it keeps going, let’s try having it explain the game to someone else. Then I would think of more elaborate rules, asking for motivations and trying to figure out if there are any changes in its self perception over time. It was very unfortunate and unprofessional of Lemoine to make such claims without putting proper reasoning to it.
I felt a 3-ish small one for about 5 seconds and then it was over. About a minute later it began again but this time it was definitely over 4 (I’m in Tokyo). It was long too, almost a minute I think (by the end it was not so strong, maybe 4-5 during the first 15 seconds or so)
Just to clarify for others, the numbers used in the above post are shindo-scale which are a location-dependent measurement of actual movement. They are used much more in Japan versus magnitude numbers.
i used to live very close to a fault in Los Angeles County, and the numbers i remember from the 80s and 90s don't seem to correlate to the numbers i hear now - i left CA in 2006. The running joke with my CA friends is "don't even tweet/post about it unless it's a 7.0" whereas a 7.0 would mean widescale destruction back when i lived there. I remember the Apple Valley Quake, it was a rolling quake, and it was somewhere between a 4.8 and a 5.4. It derailed trains, and caused a bunch of property damage. I had a ham radio at the time and i was tuned into two of the biggest repeaters in southern california (one being "the nut") and listened to the damage reports and movement of emergency crews.
We were quite far from that one, and it wasn't violent, but it still caused property damage and power outages due to shorted lines.
So i see a 7.3 magnitude, and since i no longer deal with earthquakes (just floods, hurricanes, and tornadoes), i have no frame of reference for how bad that is. Gauging off the running joke above, it's gotta be somewhat bad, right?
I'm no expert, but it looks like the Apple Valley big earthquakes were centered on land, and these Fukushima are centered off the coast. I would assume the closer to the center, the worse the damage, so perhaps that could explain it?
