> When my parents were kids, they only went to kindergarten for half a day.
Wait, hang on, is kindergarten all-day now? I was in kindergarten in... 1992, and it was half a day.
Wait, hang on, is kindergarten all-day now? I was in kindergarten in... 1992, and it was half a day.
I have no doubt if I'd stayed there (K-6), I would have been close to fluent. After lunch was a full immersion in French. My teacher was a native speaker from Belgium. I remember having mastered counting in French, which is quite interesting considering most kindergarteners probably have not mastered counting in English.
As for an anecdote, I had one friend who stayed there through 4th grade. He still lists French as a language on LinkedIn.
[Edit] By master counting I mean having mastered the language algorithm, so to speak. Once you can count to 100, it's pretty easy to get to 200, or all the way to 999 with the knowledge at hand. It's not until one thousand that you need a new word. And, IIRC, French has a _very_ mechanical counting mechanism whereby it was even simpler. Perhaps a native speaker can weigh in here?
And small world. My wife hails from Forsyth county.
Like English there are special words for some of the “teens” numbers, which is the least of the troubles. Compare deux (two) and douze (twelve) to huit (eight) and dix-huit (ten-eight, or eighteen). Mildly annoying, but we have special cases for “eleven” and “twelve” in English too, no big deal.
Then some of the tens are weird too. While quatre (four) and quarante (forty) are clear, six (six) and soixante (sixty) are a bit tricky, while deux (two) and vingt (twenty) don’t seem to be related. These are then combined in uneven ways, with twenty one being “vingt et un” (twenty and one), while other numbers using the hyphenated form of vingt-cinq (twenty-five). Again, annoying, but manageable.
And then there are the extra special case numbers like seventy, which in France is apparently soixante-dix, or literally “sixty ten”. In some countries this is a much more reasonable “septante”, but not in France. The French actually count their seventies like “soixante-dix-sept”, which translates into “sixty seventeen”, or seventy seven in English.
And then there’s eighty. Holy crap, the number eighty. In French eighty is apparently “quatre-vingts”, or “four twenties”. Whoever came up with that was a brilliant sadist. Requiring some basic multiplication just to count to eighty is downright evil stuff, especially for young kids. Ditto for whoever made ninety “quatre-vingts-dix” (four twenties ten).
Note: I am not a native French speaker; I’m just learning.
In Spanish it's more or less the same as French when it comes to naming numbers, except more predictable spelling and it's base-10: dos (two), doce (twelve), ocho (eight), dieciocho (eighteen), ochenta (eighty), noventa (nighty), cien (one hundred) and so on.
In the case of e.g dos (two) and veinte (twenty), were there doesn't seem to be any relationship, the root of veinte is "dwi" (dos), but it lost a sound somewhere along the way. Two, dos, duo, dual, double, all share the same indo-european root.
Excuse me but I understand vigesimal (base-20) like a potency. The French are not following through on that at all.
If you have a look at Mayan math you will understand how to do "proper" vigesimal.
With proper I mean that what we consider single digit numbers (0-9) which is a range of ten, to be the basis of single digits.
The Mayans actually could represent first twenty (0-19) as one "single digit".
Their idea of numbers was just much more composable than ours is.
I’ll try to give a short explanation:
There are three "words" which make Mayan numbers. A dot, a line and a shell.
The dot represents a one, the bar represents a five, the shell represents a zero.
5 dots make a line (similar to Roman)
One dot above one shell makes twenty. (1 * 20). Like we consider a one and a zero (10) to be greater than 9.
One dot above one shell above one shell makes 400 (1 * 20 * 20)
One dot above one dot above one dot makes 421 ((1 * 20 * 20) + (1 * 20) + (1 * 1))
Compared to the potency of this mathematical language the idea that French are using vigesimal is laughable, because they only denote their 80 like this.
It’s quite fascinating how logical and functional their math was, they were using the potency of zeros long before we Europeans discovered that.
I've never been there and it isn't exactly close to the Ontario or Quebec provinces of Canada.
Kidding. No, and they pronounce the city of Versailles, IN ver-sales.
I remember my mother saying how a neighbour forgot it was his turn to pick up me and my fellow neighbourhood classmates. It was at 4pm after he was off work and I'm pretty sure I would have started at 8am or 9am.
https://www.nea.org/assets/docs/18001_Full-Day_Kindergarten_...
The TL;DR being that all day Kindergarten is strongly associated with better educational outcomes. As a result, many districts are moving towards full day.
I don't think it was really a hard choice, from their perspective. "Do you want to spend 3 hours having fun with friends every day, or 6 hours?" That's right up there with, "Would you rather have one cookie or two cookies?"