The names of the numbers makes maths hard

I reported the other day that I have been reading Malcolm Gladwell’s book “Outliers”. Consistent with Mr. Gladwell’s other books, this is an excellent treatise on the hidden factors which underlie the various effects that we observe in everyday life. In this book he reflects on some of the hidden factors that lead to success in maths. He describes a feature that I have touched upon previously in this blog, but he has expanded it. Previously, I mentioned how, in German, the manner in which numbers are named separates the tens from the units and explicitly declares that tens are different things from units, an advantage which the English language does not afford to its speakers. “Outliers” makes further related points.
Mr. Gladwell writes that:
“In English, we say fourteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, and nnineteen, son one might expect hat we would also say oneteen, twoteen, threeteen and fiveteen. But we don’t. We use a different form: eleven, twelve, thirteen and fifteen. Similarly we have forty and sixty, which sound like the words they are related to (four and six), but we also say fifty thirty and twenty which sort of sound like five, three and two, but not really.” He then goes on to compare this nomenclature with that in the Chinese, Japanese and Korean languages. “They have a logical counting system. Eleven is ten one. Twelve is ten two. Twenty four is two tens four and so on.
“That difference means that Asian children learn to count much faster than American children. Four-year-old Chinese children can count, on average, to forty. American children at that age can count only to fifteen.”
He further observes that “The regularity of their number system also means that Asian children can perform basic functions such as addition much more easily. Ask an English speaking seven-year-old to add thirty-seven plus twenty-two in her head and she has to convert the words to numbers (37 + 22). Only then can she do the math… Ask an Asian child to add three-tens-seven and two-tens-two and the necessary equation is there embedded in the sentence.”
Here we see that one of the big problems with learning maths is the interplay between maths and language. Those children who master the boundary between English and numbers, get to understand how the number system works, and depending on the language they speak are facilitated in undertaking maths problems. This puts them at a great advantage over those who do not do so. At Puppet Maths we take great care to teach our pupils how to translate from one language to the other, from the language of the spoken and written word, to the language of mathematics. Once children are able to relate the numbers that they are expected to manipulate at home or at school with ideas which are described in spoken language, then the task of studying maths becomes a very much easier proposition. At Puppet Maths we facilitate this.