I need a mathematics textbook in Spanish, covering various high school math topics and hopefully calculus as well. Does anyone know a particularly good place online to find such a thing?
~Silver
(I also seek books in Spanish on the subjects of the history of mathematics and possibly random topics such as number theory, but those are of secondary importance.)
Anyway, Agoraphile, the reason isn’t just because I do that sort of thing for fun (not to say that I don’t); I’m taking part in a mathematics competition this summer, for which I shall most definitely need to study, but for the entire month immediately before then, I’ll be attending a language immersion program in which written materials in English aren’t generally permitted. Well, okay, maybe I’m a bit of a masochist, it’s a camp in Minnesota (in mid-summer) dedicated to studying Japanese. (For which my school refuses to give me any sort of credit. >:() However, I’m not so much of a masochist as to inchoately attempt to study calculus in Japanese. Last I saw, the written policy of the camp wasn’t that reading materials had to be in Japanese, just that they couldn’t be in English, so I’m going with a language I can actually understand most of the time. It’s not as harsh as it sounds - I find reading technical works a lot easier than children’s books, because techinical terms are longer and more likely to have a close cognate in English, since it’s all Latin anyway. I intend to fully exploit the loophole in the regulations and be enjoying various works of fabulous fiction as well while my cabinmates are copying kanji. ;)
[quote author=Silver Han link=board=omni;num=1052362863;start=0#3 date=05/08/03 at 22:12:24][center]...[/center] Well, okay, maybe I’m a bit of a masochist, it’s a camp in Minnesota (in mid-summer) dedicated to studying Japanese. (For which my school refuses to give me any sort of credit. >:() However, I’m not so much of a masochist as to inchoately attempt to study calculus in Japanese. ...
Actually, calculus textbooks in Japanese can be a lot of fun, although you wouldn’t learn much colloquial Japanese from the ones I remember, which were written in an orthography which more closely resembled Chinese (albeit with the verbs at the ends of the sentences) than Japanese. But if you’re going to be taking a little time off from your mathematical studies, than try to get ahold of a short story by Akutagawa Ryunosuke, entitled «Kumo no ito». Only a few pages and one main character, so even as a novice to the language it’s it’s easy to keep track of things—but I guarantee it will knock you over if you’re the least susceptible to the Buddhist (Mahayana) bug….
I’ve always wanted to learn Japanese, (along with several other unrelated languages), but as yet have been unable to designate sufficient time and energy. The languages I do know have been assimilated mainly because they were necessary and commonly used around me. I think immersion technique is very good. I’d like to see other topics taught that way at the secondary and post secondary level. At the primary level I think the Integrated Day Program (the basics are assimilated through their use for projects and such in a holistic approac—at least if I’m understanding things correctly) works better.
Patricia (who knows she drifted but doesn’t see any problem with that)
Drifting is strictly uninhibited in any and all of my threads.
Anyway, I’ve got a couple tomes in hand now, thanks iCYBELLE!
I’ve always found Japanese grammar strangely more sensible, maybe because I don’t know enough about it to realize how horrible it truly is. ;D I find the verb-last construction mildly addictive; it made it a bit harder for me to formulate simple questions in Spanish for a while afterward last year, just because the Japanese structure is so compact and to the point. (What? Japanese getting to the point? I’ve confused myself…)
Japanese structure "to the point"? Well, in a way yes. The "grammar rules" appear to be simple. But they leave enormous possibilities for ambiguity. There are many times when it is not clear exactly which noun dependent a clause defines. And this can be used as a rhetorical tool to convey more than one meaning, sort of, but not definitely. Much to the frustration of some poor gai-jin who is struggling along with a kanji-jiten and trying to crack the puzzle.
(I’m no good at that anymore, either. My Japanese has atrophied. The only thing I can do now is read selected sentences from chemical patents, which are not high level rhetorics by any means. Newspapers and such are way over my head these days.)
