The Symbolology of Sevens

~I learned something interesting today about written misunderstandings between English and Japanese. I'm not talking about the omnipresent Japanglish this time, but rather the similarities between some symbols used in written English and written Japanese. For example, the Japanese hiragana symbol for the sound "mi" looks somewhat like a cursive capital H.

In one of my classes, I was keeping a running total of points that students had accumulated over the class, to be rewarded with stickers at the end. After one activity ended, I adjusted the point totals under each student's name on the board, but one girl, upon seeing her number, was confused. It wasn't a scoring problem; instead, she pointed to what I had written and asked me, "New points?"

I was puzzled for a moment; as I had written, she had seven points. Then I realized what the misunderstanding was. The number I had written looked like this:

For comparison, here is the Japanese katakana symbol for the sound "nu":

Similar, aren't they? My student wasn't asking about "new" points, she was asking why I had written the sound nu instead of a number. I explained to the students that the horizontal slash mark in my number seven was to distinguish it from the number one, with which it can be confused:


^ To demonstrate, I drew the number one several different times on the board, changing it a bit each time to make it look more like a seven, and asking them each time whether what I had drawn was a one or a seven. When they couldn't tell, I added the slash. "Oooooh!" they said, finally getting it. Ah, knowledge. The joy of corrupting...I mean, the joy of educating young minds! ~Oyasumi.