I can't say much about that. I grew up on the Canadian education system, and while I know it's not perfect, there are far worse places to be educated. I'd say part of the blame for decline of education falls to the parents, but that's my response to everything. My parents pushed me through school, so I was always well ahead of the class. When they wanted to fail my sister back in the second grade, my parents sat down with her, and helped her understand what the teacher couldn't teach. She passed and was top of her class the following year.
Everybodies all rush rush, with less time for family. That's easy for me to say, since I don't have any extra mouths to feed.

Rush is from Canada... Neil Pert , Alex Lifeson and Geddy Lee !

I blame the US education system for using curves that protect themselves too.

Failing kids would show how bad the teaching has gotten along with parenting. Parenting has probably gotten harder by the 10th power. :P Imagine keeping your 15 year old off of Everquest or the X-box, so they do their homework. (Parents' Epic Quest)

I would rather see the McDonald's cashier that can not count back change without their H.S. Diploma. I would like to see high school diplomas actually mean something again.

There was a time when farm families took their children out of school, and the education system fought this by enacting truancy laws. This started out as a good reason, because most did not finish 10th grade. Nowadays it seems that the taxes are paying for babysitting service for K-12.

This is unfair really to a young person that from K-12 they were told they were smart and they did not need to try that hard. They then take a much harder ego hit in college when they fail miserably. Some drop out, others change majors, and some just figure it out by hitting the books harder with determination to never quit.

Life is never an undefeated season. -- Quoting some wise individual I remember the quote but not the name.

EOF

Live as if your were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever. -- Gandhi

If your army friends' kids are in the public school, I commend them for their ability to absorb Japanese. My sisters had to go to a Japanese kindergarten, where the locals didn't speak any english yet. They'd never seen such bright green or blue eyes either, and kept touching my sisters' faces. They got pinkeye often.

Japanese is surprisingly easy to learn. It doesn't have the descriptive use that english does. Everything is a general "you know what I mean" statement or question.

What's Japanese for "you know what I mean"?

Sou da ne?

"Is that so?", "Isn't that so?", "Eh, that's it, then?"

Ne as a suffix means, "know what I mean?". Women use it all the time, sometimes every sentence.

Everything is completely contextual. You look at someone and say, "Give me thing by you", instead of saying "Hand me that shiny object on the shelf". You either know what they mean or you don't. The words can have tons of uses, and the only way to tell the difference between many homonyms is how they are spelled. Hana means nose, but it also means flower. I think in one of the three alphabets, the spelling is different. In the other two, there's no difference at all. There are so many example, but they just don't work hard to make themselves understood completely. If you basically understand, that's good enough. Never try to get a native Japanese man to sign a contract if he's not educated in Western affairs. For one, he won't understand all the gibberish. Secondly, when they translate to Japanese, you just can't have legal details. It all becomes transparent generalities.

According to http://world.altavista.com/, it is

私が意味するものをあなたは知っているか.

:wink:

Don't ask me to read that. :D I never learned kanji, just conversational Japanese to get by when I was a kid. I can read the hiragana and katakana, but that's it.

Once you learn Kanji, you can write decent Japanese details (somewhat), but vocalizing the words won't make a difference.

Isn't that the problem with all written languages being translated.

Take any specification and have it translated to another language. It will lose about 70% functionality due to generalizations of language translation. Take a scientific language (French) and translate to English. Not very "descriptive!" word for word, the translator has to know the subject materials also.

Need more? http://www.xlation.com/essays/cflick.php

Thank you for sharing this tidbit of information.
I now know to be a little more patient when the "generalized" statements appear in translated specifications. (Root meaning "Specific", not generalized) :P


As with all whom know about running products and/or projects, the devil is in the details. What do you without a good specification that documents these details or existing base to reverse engineer or compare?

BTW, Who wrote the EQemulator specification?

Anyone?

Mueller?
Mueller?
Mueller?

j/k

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Maybe the Japanese like to be mysterious, and never completely understood. Makes them more life like doesn't it?

Well a_Guest03 he wasnt married and didnt have any kids when he went over there. He got married to a local girl had kids ect ect ect.

Even among themselves, one can never REALLY know what they're saying. I understand that translation loses meaning, but they just don't put the meaning in there.