Short names for numbers are better

Apparently, the human animal can hold about 2 seconds worth of number data in our heads. So if it takes us one third of a second to speak a number then we can hold 6 numbers in our heads, if we were to be able to say the name of a number in as quarter of a second, then we’d be able to hold 8 numbers in our heads. Numbers have names in Chinese which are remarkably short. Compare the Chinese word with the English word, “qi” versus “seven”, the Chinese is shorter, or even when the number of syllables are the same, “si” versus “four”, again the Chinese word is shorter. According to the work of Sstanislas Dehaene, reported in Malcolm Gladwell’s book “Outliers” the memory gap between English speaking and Chinese speaking people when it comes to remembering numbers is “entirely due to this difference in length.” The Cantonese dialect, spoken in Hong Kong, names numbers with such brevity that residents of Hong Kong have a memory span of 10 digits. In the light of the difficulty that I wrote about a couple of days ago, of pupils being unable to do mental maths because they forget the numbers that they’re supposed to be working with, the increased number retention that the Cantonese dialect gives Hong Kong residents a distinct advantage when it comes to performing mental maths. One way of overcoming the limitation of memorising numbers is to visualise them. A picture says a thousand words and instead of the information being stored in series as they are when you try and memorise some numbers, in a picture they are stored in parallel. Back in August, I wrote of bank tellers from Singapore and Hong Kong who, in the days before electronic calculators, used the abacus to perform their calculations, and how, after a while they could do the calculations without the abacus, because they simply imagined the movement of the beads on the apparatus. At Puppet Maths we encourage children to visualise the maths puzzles that they are asked to do. This is a technique that any child can master to make maths easy. And that is our aim, to make maths easy, to make maths fun, to make children enjoy maths.