The same should then also apply to the German.<p>French is even worse with their sixty ten (70) and four twenty (80) and four twenty eleven (91).<p>This problem is actually obvious to any parent whose native language has natural naming for numbers after 10 but whose kid gets math education in any of the mentioned languages.<p>Some languages have separate but still unified names for the teens (compared to the other tens). I think that it would actually really make sense to also unify these names.<p>I also think that kids should be introduced to some other numerical system beside decimal in their early years.
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.<p>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.).<p>Furthermore, the positional system often means that, when you're computing "11 + 13" as a kid, you don't even <i>say the words</i> eleven and thirteen while performing the addition.<p>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.
Maybe it's just me but I never struggled with number names nor math. I imagine even when naming numbers isn't perfectly sensical (always in some strict base 10 naming), this disadvantage resolves itself as students age. The more you experience mathematics the more you disengage with strict number naming and the more you engage with strict number writing (which is extremely sensical). Saying 'seventeen minus twelve' could give pause while mentally translating but seeing '17 - 12' really won't.
> Chinese has just nine number names, while English has more than two dozen unique number words.<p>Wut. Chinese has zero through nine, then ten, hundred, thousand, ten thousand, one hundred million. That's fifteen. Certainly better than English, still.
<a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html</a><p>Submarine for game company featured in the story.<p>The story names the companies and games for sale, but doesn't name the research papers.
I don't know, even if this effect exists, its weight on the overall math performance is really weak, there many other factors at play. Just compare the PISA results [1] of countries that use the same language:<p>FRENCH<p>France: 495<p>Switzerland: 531<p>Luxembourg[2]: 490<p>SPANISH<p>Spain: 484<p>Chile: 423<p>Mexico: 413<p>Peru: 368<p>PORTUGUESE<p>Portugal: 487<p>Brazil: 391<p>This is just a personal anecdote, but I have studied maths in 3 different languages: Basque (with a counting system similar to the French), Spanish and English. And I can't really say that I felt more comfortable using one or the other, but the three use pretty similar systems though.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.oecd.org/pisa/keyfindings/pisa-2012-results-overview.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.oecd.org/pisa/keyfindings/pisa-2012-results-overv...</a>
[2] At secondary school, in general, until the 9th class every subject is in German, except mathematics and sciences (in French) <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multilingualism_in_Luxembourg" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multilingualism_in_Luxembourg</a>
PISA Maths exams results from 2012:<p>1. Shanghai (China)
2. Singapore
3. Hong Kong (China)
4. Taiwan
5. South Korea
6. Macao (China)
7. Japan
8. Liechtenstein
9. Switzerland
10. Netherlands
11. Estonia
12. Finland
13. Canada
14. Poland
15. Belgium
16. Germany
17. Vietnam
18. Austria
19. Australia
20. Ireland
21. Slovenia
22. Denmark
23. New Zealand
24. Czech Republic
25. France
26. United Kingdom
27. Iceland
28 Latvia
29. Luxembourg
30. Norway
31. Portugal
32. Italy
33. Spain
34. Russian Federation
35. Slovak Republic
36. United States<p>Asian dominance shows, but you have to bear in mind that China "cheats" by posting separate cities, if other countries did the same ignoring less wealthy regions - they would have better results too.<p>Also there are many English-speaking countries much higher than USA, and countries with much more complicated numerals (like Baltic or Slavic countries) that are higher than USA. And German numerals are more complicated than English ones too (125 is 100 + 5 + 20).<p>I wouldn't attribute the US education problems to the language.
This author draws conclusions like a BC astronomer; they are good given the area the article is restricting itself to, but this restriction is innately wrong. Numbers are weak because natural languages don't intrinsically use them and they are taught post-linguistic development to a fractured foundation, e.g. natural languages form like slang. Lets arbitrarily call 205-chi and 210-foe, how is one to find the name for 207; there is no interconnected phoneme structure that numbers and words can jointly draw upon. Yes, numbers are a naming system, but they become just another irrelevant layer when there is not a common core to draw upon. It's funny, with so many brilliant minds continuously rewriting coding languages no one has stopped to make human language less of a symantic ambiguity. Maybe Ithkuil is our only hope.
The simplest thing English speakers could do is get rid of the spoken words for 10 - 19 entirely. But what would you replace them with?<p>Tenty-one, tenty-two, ect? No. It sounds two much like twenty-one, twenty-two, and so on.<p>Replacing the tens with "onty" words makes sense because "on" is closer "one". There's no translation step needed in thinking "Onty-eight minus Onty-two" and coming out with six.<p>It would be a simple solution to the tens problem but hard with respect to getting people to adopt it.
Japanese has different words for numbers based on what is counted. For each number 1-9 there's a Chinese-derived word and a native Japanese word. Numbers >10 always use Chinese pronounciations, except for numbers like 20 or 30 which might have a special word for them (if you're counting days or life years). Also number 4 is unlucky and has to be skipped when counting rooms or floors.
I love a lot of this new reasearch on the relationship between language and cognition, but.<p>What I hate about this article is the way that it plays on American parents' educational anxiety, implying that these very mild linguistic effects on cognition may impair Anglophone children relative to Asian children unless American parents invest in all these educational board games. The article specifically frames it as a problem of English linguistic deficiencies, which is incredibly naive. With math, children are essentially learning a new and unfamiliar symbolic language.<p>All of these correlations between language and cognition are interesting, but if you're interested in Sapir-Whorf, you're still looking at overall effects that are weak and small, overall. This correlation between linguistic/mathematical behavior may be stronger in a language like Piraha, but Daniel Everett would argue that what's going on there is less linguistic determinism and more of a cultural bias against the abstract or non-concrete.
<a href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/lexicon_valley/2013/10/16/piraha_cognitive_anumeracy_in_a_language_without_numbers.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.slate.com/blogs/lexicon_valley/2013/10/16/piraha_...</a><p>And look here at this paragraph in the OP: "The U.S.-Asian math-achievement gap—a sensitive and much-studied topic—has more complicated roots than language. Chinese teachers typically spend more time explaining math concepts and getting students involved in working on difficult problems. In the home, Chinese parents tend to spend more time teaching arithmetic facts and games and using numbers in daily life, says a 2010 study in the Review of Educational Research by researchers at the Hong Kong Institute of Education and the University of Hong Kong." Yet overall outcomes are taken as evidence of English's "linguistic disadvantages".<p>East Asian languages DO handle base-10 math in a simple, direct way that is easy to learn. This is especially true in Chinese, but begins to fall apart in Japanese. Japanese uses simpler words for higher numbers: ni-juu-hachi (two-ten-eight) for 28, for example. But Japanese also has two series of words for numbers under 10: 1 may be ichi or hitotsu, 2 may be ni or futatsu. These combine with a large series of counter words that makes counting in Japanese much more complex. Might this impact Japanese children's acquisition of numeracy? Plausibly, but it's easier to just elide over the differences in Asian languages handling of numbers.<p>There are just a plethora of linguistic differences between Asian languages and English, that necessarily impact education. Take the writing system, where Japanese has probably the most complex written system in the world, that takes over a decade to read proficiently even for native speakers. English has a terrible orthography, whose irregularities and inconsistencies make it difficult for children to learn and exacerbate economic inequality and linguistic privilege.<p>We really could spend a lot less classroom time on learning reading and writing the differences between plough, dough, and cough and more time on STEM if we improved the English orthography, but I don't exactly see the WSJ reporters calling for spelling reform =/
<a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/02/how-the-english-language-is-holding-kids-back/385291/" rel="nofollow">http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/02/how-the...</a>
Semi-relatedly, I've wondered why coders haven't adopted something like the tonal system for hexadecimal.
<a href="http://panglott.blogspot.com/2010/01/nystroms-hexadecimal-numeral-system-and.html" rel="nofollow">http://panglott.blogspot.com/2010/01/nystroms-hexadecimal-nu...</a>
My oldest son found math extremely hard to learn. Parts of this article mirror comments he has made to me about his lack of understanding in k-4 and how poorly things were explained. He was so desperate to learn math, he lied to me and his teacher both for an entire year in order to sneak his math work home and have me explain it to him.
Isn't this a form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis ?
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity</a>