Matemáticas

I now have an entire group of words related to mathematics stored in my Spanish arsenal. I was sitting outside on the porch playing a game on my iPod when my host mom poked her head out the door.

“Are you good with math?” She asked me. I thought back to this time last year when I was recovering from Prof Wang’s multivariate calculus class.

“Sí.”

We began with an exercise on identifying rational and irrational numbers. She has a math book that she is using to study for a test that she’s taking in October (it seems to be something similar to a GED test). It was very strange because I kept thinking, This really brings me back, but at the same time it was almost like learning it afresh as I read through the explanation in a language I almost understand. Once I had made sure that I remembered correctly, my next task was explaining it in language other than that used in the book. It was a little bit difficult because I had to go through all of the meanings of the different symbols (Ø empty set, and other things that Microsoft Word doesn’t have like, union, intersection, etc.) which I had never really taken the time to learn.

Once we climbed that hill, we moved on to equation comparison (<, >, =, etc.). I told my host mom about the mnemonic I used (and still use) to know which way to put the greater than and less than signs (the little one eats the big one, ie. 9<10). She seemed to enjoy that so  I also explained GEMA to her (Grouping symbols, exponents, etc.) which was more difficult because I didn’t know many of those words in Spanish and had to take a lot of time flipping back and forth through my dictionary and pointing at examples. I also taught her SOHCAHTOA (a way to remember sine, cosine, and tangent). I lucked out in this one because though all of the words are different in Spanish, they all start with the same letters (seno, coseno, tangente, opuesto, adyacente, hipotenusa), so the acronym held true.

While helping her made me very happy that I am done with math (maybe??), it was very useful to know all of those words in Spanish.

So, now I can explain to you how to show sets on a number line (and much more! ) using both Spanish and English!