heni30 Posted June 4, 2014 Share Posted June 4, 2014 (edited) The Scripps National Spelling Bee is (or was) as American as apple pie. Here are the winners from the last 7 years: 2008 - Sameer Mishra 2009 - Kavya Shivashankar 2010 - Anamika Veeramani 2011 - Sukanya Roy 2012 - Snigdha Nandipati 2013 - Arvind Mahankali 2014 - Sriram J. Hathwar, Ansun Sujoe Should we ban Indians from participating in spelling bees citing unfair competition? (and Kenyans from the NYC marathon) Seriously though, what's going on here? Is it the tiger dads and moms? Is it some genetic disposition to being able to spell/memorize well? Is it their language/culture that wires the brain in such a way that facilitates this ability? Edited June 4, 2014 by heni30 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tommy L Posted June 4, 2014 Share Posted June 4, 2014 The Scripps National Spelling Bee is (or was) as American as apple pie. Here are the winners from the last 7 years: 2008 - Sameer Mishra 2009 - Kavya Shivashankar 2010 - Anamika Veeramani 2011 - Sukanya Roy 2012 - Snigdha Nandipati 2013 - Arvind Mahankali 2014 - Sriram J. Hathwar, Ansun Sujoe Should we ban Indians from participating in spelling bees citing unfair competition? (and Kenyans from the NYC marathon) Seriously though, what's going on here? Is it the tiger dads and moms? Is it some genetic disposition to being able to spell/memorize well? Is it their language/culture that wires the brain in such a way that facilitates this ability? I would imagine its cultural. Akin to the notion that East Asians are good at math due to their numerical system being easier to learn to twenty. My kid (he's 3) stumbles at the number 13. He can count to 40 but to throw a teen in there is just plain weird. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
heni30 Posted June 4, 2014 Author Share Posted June 4, 2014 (edited) French is even weirder. Learning it over there as an adult I couldn't beleive there was no word for eighty. Basically it's "four-twenty". AND ninety is "four-twenty-ten"! ninety three is "four-twenty-thirteen"! As far as teens go they only have 3 - 17,18,19 Spanish has 16,17,18,19 Edited June 4, 2014 by heni30 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RyderSK Posted June 4, 2014 Share Posted June 4, 2014 I always wondered how anyone could invent spelling competitions. All around world most kids today know 2 or 3 languages by age of 10, only americans get awarded genius award for correctly spelling word of their own. It's amazing. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
xEndlessxUrbiax Posted June 4, 2014 Share Posted June 4, 2014 If they are following all the rules in order to compete, which I'm guessing is they attend an American school and they are within a grade range or age range, then I don't see the problem with them competing and kicking ass. Good job to them. The American school system can learn a lot of things from other countries when it comes to education. Same with the marathons, if they are observing all the rules then more power to them to kick some ass. When the Kenyans host a food eating contest then we can send a couple of our big boys over there to show them how it's done. Oh wait, the Japanese are better at that... All languages have some quirk to them, it just depends what you grow up learning. The French language has a lot of rules and if you follow them you'll be alright. The English language also has some rules but more often then not you have to break them which is really difficult for a foreigner to understand. See here for some examples: https://web.cn.edu/kwheeler/English_hard_2learn.html Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
heni30 Posted June 4, 2014 Author Share Posted June 4, 2014 I always wondered how anyone could invent spelling competitions. All around world most kids today know 2 or 3 languages by age of 10, only americans get awarded genius award for correctly spelling word of their own. It's amazing. Of course a large part of this is because Europe is so much smaller and everyone is in proximity to other countries which facilitates learning other languages. I was lucky growing up in a border town in Arizona where everyone learned English and Spanish simultaneously. I lived in Paris for a year and was able to carry a lot of Spanish over into learning French (and Italian). Most of the people in France were definitely not multi-lingual unless they were studying languages. And the spelling bee is an anachronistic tradition being carried on in a kind of nostalgic way from an era where elementary school kids would compete with each other in a wholesome and innocent way, which I'm sure was the case in all cultures. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Zdravko Barisic Posted June 4, 2014 Share Posted June 4, 2014 If you could speak Serbian, you could not have any problems, as it is completly phonetical. https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090305134104AADeZYv Its the same as Craotian. Serbian is COMPLETELY phonetic, which means one sound for one symbol, but this is only the case with cyrillic alphabet, because if you write in latin letters you use two symbols for letters nj, lj, dž etc ... but it is very close to that, 99.99%. That's why Croatian is not. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RyderSK Posted June 4, 2014 Share Posted June 4, 2014 Well, french are case of its own too, you're quite correct they're not really multi-lingual by default, though they're rather exception. Still, they have very inconsistent spelling to pronunciation akin to english, but never heard of them doing spelling competitions :- ). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Scott Schroeder Posted June 4, 2014 Share Posted June 4, 2014 Because they give a crap about education? While the average American counterparts are OMG wut is Biebs doing? LOL @ Kimye! Luk at teh lulz! Now if we only had a spelling bee twitter style, then the US could excel at something. Just wait until the kids who win start texting and tweeting, they'll turn into idiotic buffoons soon enough. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
heni30 Posted June 4, 2014 Author Share Posted June 4, 2014 (edited) Damn! We did have the fastest texter - teenager from Seattle (Indian!!??) - till yet ANOTHER foreigner beats us out! "Marcel Fernandes, a 16-year-old from Brazil, typed out a 25-word paragraph in 18.19 seconds on April 25. The previous record was set in January by Gaurav Sharma, a 15-year-old from Seattle. Sharma texted the same paragraph in 18.44 seconds using Microsoft’s newest Windows Phone 8.1 software, with the lauded Word Flow keyboard." It's hopeless............. On a serious note though, my seventeen year old daughter is in a magnet program and took 4 AP courses this past year. Plus she was on the swim team, cross-country team and president of the German club and in the National Honor Society. She would regularly stay up every night till 1-2 am doing homework and even later when there was a test. I think American education is alive and well; unfortunately just not available to everyone. We're just middle class but put a high priority on learning. Poorer kids without the example, support and push of educated parents are at a huge disadvantage. Those toddler/preschool years are crucial. Edited June 4, 2014 by heni30 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ernest Burden III Posted June 4, 2014 Share Posted June 4, 2014 ban men from archviz? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tommy L Posted June 4, 2014 Share Posted June 4, 2014 ban men from archviz? Ha. I cant tell if you are saying only Indians take part in the spelling bee or that men are far superior at arch-vis. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ernest Burden III Posted June 4, 2014 Share Posted June 4, 2014 Ha. I cant tell if you are saying only Indians take part in the spelling bee or that men are far superior at arch-vis. I'm saying I find this thread distasteful. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
heni30 Posted June 4, 2014 Author Share Posted June 4, 2014 (edited) Didn't mean for it to go that way. If you read my OP I'm asking about the phenomenon as a cultural thing. Why is it Indians and not Chinese winning the spelling bees? I was reading Malcolm Gladwell's "The Outliers" and he goes into why Chinese are so good at math and like Tom mentions the fact that their numbers 1-20 are easier to grasp but then he goes into cultivating rice paddys and the precise care and patience that that takes and how that comes indirectly into the picture. I saw this connection with spelling bees, that being in the new recently, and was genuinely curious about the "why" of it. And was interested in exploring it. (I was discussing it with my Indians friends at noon today at our Dunkin Donuts down the street.) Satire is not supposed to be taken seriously. I really don't think it's taken that distasteful a turn. Edited June 5, 2014 by heni30 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RyderSK Posted June 5, 2014 Share Posted June 5, 2014 http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/feb/05/the-triple-package-what-really-determines-success-book-review {Tiger Mom Says Some Nationalities And Religions Are Superior To Others} I guess this is where you're heading :- ) It's bullshit. They should be awarded a price for the most absurd pseudo-science theory and be done with it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nic H Posted June 5, 2014 Share Posted June 5, 2014 unusual thread i agree ban men from arch vis Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
heni30 Posted June 5, 2014 Author Share Posted June 5, 2014 Here's an NPR article that does a pretty good job of explaining the phenomenon realistically: http://www.npr.org/2012/05/29/153898668/why-indian-americans-reign-as-spelling-bee-champs Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Zdravko Barisic Posted June 5, 2014 Share Posted June 5, 2014 "...I have an Indian-American friend who jokes : "Have you *seen* Indian names?! Of course we can spell anything!" ..." Thats so true! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
harryhirsch Posted June 5, 2014 Share Posted June 5, 2014 well, no one goes to Harvard because of a spelling bee..Asian kids learn 7 days a week from the morning to midnight...and if you have a population like China and India (both count for 40% of the worlds population) then you have a big human pool to find talents..if our kids would study as hard as the Asian kids do and we would have such a huge population then our kids would be eaqualy good in math...science is not related to language skills, how many important inventions came from India and China in the last century100? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tommy L Posted June 5, 2014 Share Posted June 5, 2014 well, no one goes to Harvard because of a spelling bee..Asian kids learn 7 days a week from the morning to midnight...and if you have a population like China and India (both count for 40% of the worlds population) then you have a big human pool to find talents..if our kids would study as hard as the Asian kids do and we would have such a huge population then our kids would be eaqualy good in math...science is not related to language skills, how many important inventions came from India and China in the last century100? There's a whole paragraph of mis-information and conjecture right there. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
howelaw1 Posted June 12, 2014 Share Posted June 12, 2014 I can see this thread slowly degenerating from here Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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