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She tried 960 times

nytimes.com

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Re: She tried 960 times

#41

Post by w1ntermute »

10ren wrote: post #40

> "Sajeonogi," or "Knocked down four times, rising up five." Is Korean really that much more efficient than English, or is that word a label? The instructors started to teach her after 949 tries - 949 tries, of watching this poor woman fail! - then she did learn, and got it on the 11th try after that. Teaching her was frustrating to them, I think mainly because they weren't really teaching her about driving, but a su…

> > "Sajeonogi," or "Knocked down four times, rising up five."

> Is Korean really that much more efficient than English, or is that word a label?

No, it's a 사자성어 (sajasongoh), or 4 character idiom. They originally come from Chinese, in which they're called chéngyǔ (成语 or 成語, in simplified and traditional characters, respectively), meaning "set phrase", and also exist in Japanese, in which they're called 四字熟語 (yojijukugo, literally "four character Chinese idiom").

Because of their origin in classical Chinese and their brevity, they're impossible to understand unless they're explained to you. In Asian countries, memorizing/understanding these proverbs is a big part of schooling.

I don't know the details of this particular sajasongoh, but I'm guessing that it either comes from classical Chinese or is a modified version of one that does. Modifying these proverbs to fit a particular situation is a common form of wordplay in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. For example, the Chosun Ilbo (a big Korean newspaper) loves doing this in their headlines.

Re: She tried 960 times

#42

Post by robryan »

The test givers must be quiet stubborn to, can't imagine something like that ever happening here for some kind of similar test, she would just get passed or turned away in the first 10.

Interesting question is that now that she got 60/100 does she understand things much better than 3 years ago, some form of understanding would spike the scores quickly, while the slow improvement can only seem to be the result of slightly better memorisation of question->answer each time without much better understanding.

Re: She tried 960 times

#43

Post by forensic »

w1ntermute wrote: post #41
10ren wrote: post #40

> "Sajeonogi," or "Knocked down four times, rising up five." Is Korean really that much more efficient than English, or is that word a label? The instructors started to teach her after 949 tries - 949 tries, of watching this poor woman fail! - then she did learn, and got it on the 11th try after that. Teaching her was frustrating to them, I think mainly because they weren't really teaching her about driving, but a su…

> > "Sajeonogi," or "Knocked down four times, rising up five." > Is Korean really that much more efficient than English, or is that word a label? No, it's a 사자성어 (sajasongoh), or 4 character idiom. They originally come from Chinese, in which they're called chéngyǔ (成语 or 成語, in simplified and traditional characters, respectively), meaning "set phrase", and also exist in Japanese, in which they're called 四字熟語 (yojijuk…

so it's like Brangelina

Re: She tried 960 times

#44

Post by Raphael »

sliverstorm wrote: post #13
kilian wrote: post #7

It's probably a webdesigner-thing to think of 960 as a nice round number, but that's the first thing I thought upon reading that.

It's a relatively common number in computing. It's similar to how numbers such as 512, 256 and 1024 are intimately familiar to me.

It's not a power of 2 (although it is 512 + 256 + 128 + 64). Chess960 is the most popular variant of Chess, having 960 possible board layouts. There is the famous CSS framework, 960 Grid System. And it happens to be in the family of common display dimension, being twice the height of standard definition, 480, like the new iPhone and iPod, as well as half the width of an HD television (1080), 1920.

Re: She tried 960 times

#46

Post by kijinbear »

forensic wrote: post #43
w1ntermute wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > "Sajeonogi," or "Knocked down four times, rising up five." > Is Korean really that much more efficient than English, or is that word a label? No, it's a 사자성어 (sajasongoh), or 4 character idiom. They originally come from Chinese, in which they're called chéngyǔ (成语 or 成語, in simplified and traditional characters, respectively), meaning "set phrase", and also exist in Japanese, in which they're called 四字熟語 (yojijuk…

so it's like Brangelina

More like acronyms, I'd say. For example, "HTTP" = hyper-text transfer protocol.

It's funny that the word 사자성어 (meaning: 4-character idiom) is itself a 4-character idiom. East Asians like 4-character groups so much, they even read numbers in groups of 4 digits. For example, 1,234,567,890 would be read 12 억 3456 만 7890.

Re: She tried 960 times

#47

Post by protez »

diziet wrote: post #21

To me, this is an extremely sad story about the way we treat knowledge and learning. How absurd is it to cheer for someone that memorizes questions and answers without having contextual knowledge about the actual meaning behind those questions? It's not dedication, it's thick-headed stubbornness. The lady has been at it for about five years now. If she did it the right way, she could have learned to learn , then lear…

Her brute learning style reminds me of training artificial neural network from no prior knowledge: feeding problem-solution pairs to a Bayesian network again and again, hoping the ANN will reproduce the relationship somehow. We think her learning style sad and absurd, but such a statistical training technique logical and scientific. Just my two cents.

Re: She tried 960 times

#48

Post by jacquesm »

kenjackson wrote: post #30
Goladus wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

She's 60+ years old and has been selling vegetables and working on farms most of her life. She doesn't remind me of college students or graduates at all. For her, learning how to learn is probably much more difficult than you think it is.

Well its not so much that learning to learn is more difficult, but learning to learn in a given domain. If you don't have someone to teach you, figuring out the ideal way to learn something can be tricky. For example, the Rubiks Cube. I'm sure there are great ways to learn to solve this puzzle, but I learned using a very time consuming technique with a lot of failure. While I have a really good schema for book learni…

Learning to solve the puzzle would mean that you learned how to solve it without memorizing a technique.

There is a big difference between actually solving the cube and learning how to 'solve' it using some technique someone else came up with.

Solving it means that you analyzed the workings of the cube, figured out a way to return it to its original state without access to some outside source of information on how to do it.

Screwdrivers probably shouldn't count as a 'solution' in this sense ;)

Re: She tried 960 times

#49

Post by jacquesm »

jlees wrote: post #22

To me, this is less about the fact a single woman had to memorise a written driving test by failing it 949 times, and more about the mismatch between the test itself and the populace. Surely she is fairly indicative of a rural inhabitant? Why is the test so inaccessible, and how many others are there like her?

960 - 1 = ?

Re: She tried 960 times

#50

Post by Natsu »

Raphael wrote: post #44
sliverstorm wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a relatively common number in computing. It's similar to how numbers such as 512, 256 and 1024 are intimately familiar to me.

It's not a power of 2 (although it is 512 + 256 + 128 + 64). Chess960 is the most popular variant of Chess, having 960 possible board layouts. There is the famous CSS framework, 960 Grid System. And it happens to be in the family of common display dimension, being twice the height of standard definition, 480, like the new iPhone and iPod, as well as half the width of an HD television (1080), 1920.

> It's not a power of 2 (although it is 512 + 256 + 128 + 64).

Well, if that counts as "round" then I have to remind you that any integer can be written as a unique sum of various powers of two (or ten, or eight, or ...).

That said, being able to quickly convert an arbitrary number into that form has proven useful more than a few times. But I admit that I never realized that playing a very old, free game called "Binary Blitz" would turn out to be quite so useful to me.

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