alt Hacker NewsThis resonates with me. I live in the Netherlands and back when I was a teenager, the English language started to become trendy so high schools began programmes where certain subjects were taught in English. I enrolled in one of these, generally liked it, but it made me hate biology.
Thing is, in my native Dutch, most things from nature have normal, natural sounding names. Words like "scheenbeen" (shin bone), "longontsteking" (lung inflammation), "boterbloem" (butter flower). In English, every single term in biology seems to be a 7-syllable latin word, directly anglicised (respectively "tibia", "pneumonia" and "ranunculus" in my examples - admittedly not 7 syllables but no less ridiculous) (how do you people even pronounce "ranunculus"??).
I simply don't understand why the language famous for having the largest vocabulary in the world couldn't give any bone other than "rib" a regular English sounding name (This also makes House MD needlessly hard to watch).
This made biology seem like mostly learning Latin word lists by heart. I simply didn't see the point! There'd be pages with pictures of the human body and just forty lines with Latin words pointed to them, and that was this week's teaching. If this stuff wouldn't be so cryptic, maybe there had been more space for wonderment. I once saw a Dutch language biology book from a parallel class and it was so much better.
I think it also depends on where you're coming from and what the end goal is. For reference, I'm an American who moved to NL a few years ago and speak Dutch at a B2 level.
When I was in school, biology as a subject was a high school level course. If you were in one of the classes meant for "advanced" students, the textbook was more of a college prep book as opposed to simply learning the concepts. Sure, the concepts were there, but the book was written from the perspective of teaching students that were interested in university level biology and ultimately medicine.
If your school imported books in English without performing due diligence to compare the philosophy of both books (Dutch vs English), then yea, it makes sense that the English one seems like overkill. Pair that with the lack of awareness that goes hand-in-hand with learning a new language and it's also not surprising that it all seems very confusing. When you grow up with one very specific language, a lot of concepts get into your brain without trying. I didn't grow up needing a biology textbook to teach me what a clavicle was, even if I knew there was also a simpler word (collarbone). You can't take that sort of implicit language knowledge for granted.
I've learned a lot over the past few years really diving in and trying to speak a new language with fluency. It takes a ton of work (thousands and thousands of hours of active learning) and then you're still behind by the decades of life that you can never live through again. Childhood years especially play a huge role in the amount of information that you absorb about society and culture that are later incorporated into your education and life as an adult.
> This made biology seem like mostly learning Latin word lists by heart.
I took a "pre-med" biology course in high school for extra credit that was essentially this. Each week, we had to memorize 25 more bones and there was a quiz (on top of other normal homework and lectures). This is me putting the conspiracy hat on, but it felt like a way to weed out disinterested students from pursuing a career in medicine if they didn't have the innate attention to detail that _the field thinks_ (note: I'm making an assumption as to their opinion of what makes a good doctor) is useful. This goes back to my first point about not using the correct textbook for the stated goals outlined by the writers of educational curriculum for a school district or state body.
Sites like Brilliant or Khan Academy show that material is available to break down these complicated subjects into something easier to understand, but that doesn't mean anything if the decisions are made to buy thousands of textbooks in bulk based on some nebulous rating system of "this one is better" or "they use it at Harvard/Stanford/MIT so it must be good" instead of evaluating it for the audience that will actually be consuming the material.
So yea, it's confusing for everyone I believe, there are easier ways to learn these concepts and it's up to educators and policy writers to take that into consideration when choosing curriculum.
The Dutch language biology book was likely written for a more focused approach to what is practical for people to use in their day to day lives, and looking at the structure of the Dutch education system, I can easily see that being the case. It was normal for me growing up to not read an entire textbook over the course of an academic year. We only read certain chapters that the teacher decided were important to pass the state mandated exams and our focus was placed there. To get out of those "simpler" classes, you had to self select for more difficult courses. What was your experience with textbooks growing up? Did you read all of them cover to cover as a part of the curriculum?
Last point - just for fun; the entire point of House MD is that it's supposed to be full of medical speak that normies don't understand. It creates tension and mystery that makes for exciting TV. What makes House standout further though, is that they didn't shortcut the biology just for the sake of TV, but found a way to make it the focus of the drama!