Comment by weland | Hacker News Reader

Comment by weland | Hacker News Reader

I haven't read the scientific article article in question, so I cannot challenge the statistics (if any) or the methodology (since I don't know it), but I'm curious if there's any guess about the underlying mechanism here. Because it sounds a little fishy to me.

My native language is one of those that would supposedly make it easier to count beyond 10 (i.e. if you go back long enough in the linguistic history, 11 would be translated as "one [unit] after/on top of ten"), but the generalization is awkward: 21 is roughly "two tens and one". You have to remember about as many rules as in English (eleven and twelve are awkward, the rest aren't. My whole touted advantage would be in only two numbers.).

Furthermore, the positional system often means that, when you're computing "11 + 13" as a kid, you don't even say the words eleven and thirteen while performing the addition.

Besides, if complexity of the numerical system would be an indication, no one in France should know math. Quatre-vingt-dix-neuf is a frickin' lesson in arithmetic all by itself. I think 90% of the awkward conversations I've had in French were "please show me the numbers on the screen because I have no idea what you're mumbling there" at the supermarket.

I agree. It’s less about numbering system in different language and the numbers from eleven to nineteen is really just one tenth of the numbers in 0-100. It is simply that Chinese children spend much more time practicing those maths, because of many historical and culture reasons. They actually never think about any words when calculating 11 + 13, they just know the result right after they see them.

However, in terms of multiplication, the problem of English is not ..teens, but the pronounciation of numbers. Chinese or Korean has one simple syllable for each number, so only two syllable (at most 3 if you count “ten”) is needed when you shout out 32. Chinese children spend a whole year’s morning reciting multiplication table, which I could never imagine how terrible it would be if recite it in English. Therefore, every grade 3 children would shout out simple multiplication results immediately.

However, on the other hand, I believe most of the advanced mathematical concepts have nothing to do with numbers in a language.

> the problem of English is not ..teens, but the pronounciation of numbers. Chinese or Korean has one simple syllable for each number

I once found when mentally tallying points while grading papers, instead of saying "and a half" in my head, if I say the Chinese "ban" instead (e.g. "four-ban", "seventeen-ban") it becomes far easier to do.

Hearing numbers in German gives me always a pause. "Dreiundzwanzig" (23) - wait, let me swap the digits in my head so it would make sense for me and "Zwan" is not even "Zwei".

Also "Dreizehn" and "Dreißig" - ok, the first one is actually 13 and the last one is 30.

So there is a large research field awaiting. /s

I agree that it does sound strange to an English ear, but that's just because we're used to our system. In English, after 11 and 12, we have three-ten, four-ten, etc. Just aged for seasoning.

If you had read the article, you would have seen that that's what it's about.

Do you have a link to the research article. The press article has too much hand waving and very little details. The most interesting paragraphs is:

> The negative impact of English is apparent in a 2014 study comparing 59 English-speaking Canadian children from Ottawa, Canada, with 88 Turkish children from Istanbul, ranging in age from 3 to 41/2 years. The Turkish children had received less instruction in numbers and counting than the Canadians. Yet the Turkish children improved their counting skills more after practicing in the lab with a numbered board game, according to the study, co-written by Jo-Anne LeFevre, director of the Institute of Cognitive Science at Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario. Turkish students learning to count in their native language "mastered it more quickly" than the children learning in English, Dr. LeFevre says.

If I read this literally, they are generalizing from a group of 59 students. Were all of them from one school in Canada and one school in Turkey? Did they repeat the experiment? Other languages?

"Mastered it more quickly" means that the number of turns to get a perfect score by the Turkish children was smaller than the number of turn to get a perfect score by the Canadian children? Or nobody get a perfect score and the Canadian children always got better scores than the Turkish children, but the improvement was bigger in the Turkish children than the Canadian children?

They have children between 3 an 4.5 y.o. (or 41/2 = 10.5?) How did they test all of them. The difference between 3 and 4.5 is very big (and with 10.5 is huge). I'm not sure that my daughter understood numbers as big as 10 when she was 3 years old.

> The Turkish children had received less instruction in numbers and counting than the Canadians. Yet the Turkish children improved their counting skills more after practicing in the lab with a numbered board game, according to the study...

To me, that almost sounds like there's a skill level ceiling that's as far as the numbered board game can take you, and the Turkish children improved more because they were further from the game's ceiling to begin with, because they had received less previous instruction in numbers and counting.

Malcolm Gladwell talks about this in his book Outliers, which may be a better explanation for you.

Here is an excerpt from that section: http://gladwell.com/outliers/rice-paddies-and-math-tests/

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