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  • History of Elementary Mathematics
    
  • Japanese is not easy.
    
  • Kanji is very difficult.
    
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RAKUGAKICHO

NO.1

Now let's begin History of Elementary Mathematics. This History of Elememtary Mathematics is based on "History of Mathematics" by D.E.Smith. This book is a little old (first edition is 1923.), so those who know new facts or discoveries, please let me know.
Everyone konws History of Mathematics is the "history" of "mathematics", but when someone ask what is "mathematics" or what is "history", we will be annoyed. This time I'll introduce what D.E.Smith thought.
Some people think that "history" means "a narration of recorded events", but he says in this book he "looks upon it as a relation of incidents which probably happened even before the advent of the human race" and will write Chapter I (Prehistoric Mathematics) from this point of view.

It is said that Japanese is one of the most difficult language, but seeing that almost all Japanese can speak it, it is never a diabolic language which makes foreigners impossible to learn. But teaching Japanese to children, I find a lot of problems which is difficult to understand or easy to misunderstand. In this column, I'll take up them one by one.

"Kanji" means Chinese characters which are used in Japanese. So it often happens that both Japanese and Chinese use the same Kanji and that its meaning isn't the same. And one of the difficulties of Japanese Kanji is some kanji have several kinds of pronunciations. For Example, Kanji『生』is pronounced as "sheng" in Chinese, but in Japanese it is pronounced as "sei","sho","ha(eru)","o(u)","u(mareru)","i(kiru)", "nama" and "ki". It is also very difficult for the Japanese children to learn.