This was a weekly reading session of the math and CS book club approaching basic topics in mathematics.
We followed the YouTube series “Maths in Japanese”. This one is designed to introduce mathematical terms for basic topics in mathematics, e.g. basic arithmetic terms, basic geometric terms, basic concepts in algebra… The YouTube series offers human written transcripts (subtitles) you can follow along while watching the videos. Each clip is between 5~12 minutes long.
To solidify the introduced terms we mixed in Wikipedia articles that cover a (loosely) related topic.
Just trying to watch more Japanese content. First few videos are short and seem reasonable.
1.1 was a a little fast but that’s okay.
I instantly forgot everything after watching but I did recognize a few terms like さん and わる
Kind of cool to have math explained in another language.
I’d like to watch the first few videos.
math 1.2
Pretty easy enough.
I’ll remember than comma can also mean decimal
Awesome. Thanks for sharing and welcome to this book club Hopefully some of the terms introduced in the videos will pop up in the Wikipedia articles as well to help us to internalize them
And it looks like the Crabigator is preparing me for this book club as well… this is one of my newest items on WK:
I like the idea of following along with youtube videos, especially as the content sounds appropriate enough to watch at work during lunch or a break.
The Wikipedia articles look horrendously long and not language learner friendly (although that’s most of Wikipedia), so if sections from the articles aren’t picked, I may only follow the discussion and not directly read them. If only some sections are picked, I’m sure the people who want to read the whole article will do so anyway and comment in the thread too.
Also, regarding the start time, I wonder how many current members of the book club are taking the JLPT? Personally, I’m devoting my non social free time to that, so I’ll probably join about a week late.
Thanks for sharing. Yes, the poll is quite balanced with some people interested in reading the full articles and some in splitting / reading only parts of it. That’s why ~ so far ~ I favor to recommend some sections for those who do not want to read the full articles instead of splitting it in multiple weeks. As you pointed out, with this strategy those who want to read the full article can do this as well.
As for myself, the articles are a little bit above my level so I will only read parts of the Wikipedia articles. …and I’ll try to find those that utilizes some of the terms we’ve encountered in the video clips from the mentioned YouTube series
That’s a very good point. I’ll take the mock test during the upcoming community event but I totally understand that those who are going for the actual certificate will be super focused the days before the test… and probably want a little bit of rest afterwards
Would be cool to have you joining us once you fell ready for new adventures after the JLPT.
Not really sure why I watched this
but I did. I have zero interest in math.
Well actually I’m trying to get off of English content and I don’t really know what to watch yet. Math videos can’t hurt. It all counts.
Thanks for checking-in. Yes, during コンピュータの秘密 book club I was usually checking-in with my own questions / thoughts at the end of the week ~ or beginning of next week depending on RL situation. But of course everyone can join in for the discussion at any time
We didn’t do any additional polls during the other book club but I am planning to do one after week two to see how reading the first Wikipedia article went for everyone.
Any ideas / suggestions you want to throw in? Absolutely feel encouraged to address them here or directly apply them… e.g. in case you have some polls in mind
Weekly participation polls are usually nice - they remind people that the new week’s reading is now up for discussion, you get to see how many people are reading along/have fallen behind/stopped reading, and of course clicking things is always fun
Looks like the first week is almost over already. How is everyone doing? Some of you were busy preparing (and taking) the JLPT and some of you are in the middle of some exam period, right? Hope, everything works out well
This week we had four videos in total so it is a lot of different material to cover. We will have less videos in the upcoming weeks.
In general, I think the videos are very convenient to follow along. So for those of you who are more into extensive than intensive reading or listening this series seems to work pretty well, I think.
Personally, I’m very happy I came across the terms 「Oの位」and「繋ぐ」which I learned with our previous book club
Next week we will read our first Wikipedia article. I’ll post a proposal for those of us who do not wish to read the full article later / tomorrow depending on your timezone. I think I’ll stick with the ones I made in our home thread but I’d like to properly link them to some of the material we covered during this week.
Last but not least I am thinking about making some short quizzes so you have something more to Poll on. So stay tuned
I just watched the videos and they’re really well done and to the point, I enjoyed them.
I thought the notation for repeating decimals with a dot on top was interesting, I’ve never seen that. Is it just a Japan thing? Pretty sure they never taught me this in school.
I didn’t really want to commit to this book club so I haven’t been participating in the polls, just stalking, but we’ll see how things go
Welcome to week two. Let’s see who will read along this week
Week 2 ~ Are you reading with us?
I’m reading along
I’ll catch up later
I’ll skip this one
I’ve dropped it completely
Nope, only here for polling
0voters
This week we will read about “Natural Numbers”. Everyone who wants to read the full article feel free to do so.
Everyone who only wants to read part of the article feel free to chose something from the following parts:
[1] Introduction: here you’ll get a brief introduction to what a natural number is. It relates especially to the video Math 1.4 as it embeds the natural numbers into whole numbers / integers and addresses the “problem” with the number zero.
[2] 記法: here you’ll learn different mathematical notations for what is addressed in [1]
[3] 特殊な自然数: here you’ll the terms for prime numbers will be revised. Again, this one relates to Math 1.4, I think.
[4] 形式的な定義: here you’ll get a mathematical definition on what a natural number is. Some vocabulary terms from Math 1.1 are used and you can practice reading equations. ( → E.g. do you remember the terms for “brackets” ) You’ll also learn the terms for distribution law or commutative law and others. Some of them we will see again in week eight when we read about vector spaces.
My recommendations:
[1] and [2] go very well together. Especially in case you are busy with other book clubs or RL stuff. You can extend it to [1], [2] and [3].
[4] Seems to be very nice in case you want to enhance the topics discussed in week 1.
Not gonna lie, those videos were pretty challenging and fast for me (probably because I still need to work on my listening skills), but hopefully as we go along I’ll get used to them more (or maybe just put them on 0.75x speed lol).
→ math or cs related term
Hopefully some of the terms introduced in the videos will pop up in the Wikipedia articles as well to help us to internalize them 
) You’ll also learn the terms for distribution law or commutative law and others. Some of them we will see again in week eight when we read about vector spaces.