My youngest son is in the 2nd grade and he is now learning his multiplication tables. I hear that things are a bit different in America these days, with some new strange ways of learning in the common core math, but at least when I was in school we simply memorized our multiplication tables, and it is still much the same in Japan. The twist is they have a strange song to help them memorize them. The song uses some non-standard pronunciations that make the song flow better than it might otherwise and is suppose to help make memorizing easier. And it seems to work well, because even a hairy barbarian like me can easily memorize this song (it helps that my son is constantly playing it or singing it himself).

The song is called kuku no uta(九九の歌), literally "nine nine song". 9 9 because the table ends at 9 x 9.

This is kind of fun. Let's look at the start of it.

It begins with 1 x 1 = 1, which is sung as in ichi ga ichi (いん　いち　が　いち)

Literally that is singing "one one is one". It is a little weird though because one is usually pronounces ichi, not in (i has the ee sound in Japan's Latin script romaji, so it's pronounced as een)

The next one is 1 x 2 = 2, sung as in ni ga ni (いん　に　　が　に), literally "one two is two".

Jumping ahead to a higher one, we have 3 x 6 = 18, sung sabu roku jūhachi, literally "three six eighteen". No ga ("is") this time. And 3, which is usually san, has the nonstandard pronunciation sabu. I'm not sure if the ga is missing for reasons of space or otherwise. I asked my wife but she doesn't know. I think it might have something to do with working on a soroban (an abacus), but not many people use those these days, so it doesn't really matter.

Anyway, I know most of you don't know Japanese, so the sound changes probably aren't so interesting to you, but maybe the entire song might be a little interesting. So here is a version from youtube:

I asked my son for a good one. He says this one is too slow so he doesn't like it but, he added, it's probably good for foreigners so we should pick it. So there you go—my son picked this one out just for you guys!

Anyway, just kind of an interesting trivia here. As my kids go to school and I see more of the Japanese education system, these things that are different from the American system I was raised in always jump out at me.

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David LaSpina is an American photographer and translator lost in Japan, trying to capture the beauty of this country one photo at a time and searching for the perfect haiku. He blogs here and at laspina.org. Write him on Twitter or Mastodon.