
Abacus tournaments in Japan - gautamcgoel
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/21/world/asia/japan-abacus.html
======
patio11
I very rarely suggest edits to HN titles but I feel like adding "for two
hours" makes the title a lot truer than the New York Times' one, and that
after you have the true title with the "Wow, Japan, how charmingly
inscrutable" removed from it, there is very little reason to read the rest of
it.

Abacuses are a niche hobby in Japanese schools, in the same fashion that e.g.
competitive poetry recital is a niche hobby in American schools, and _are
factually not_ taught in the fashion that e.g. poetry is taught in American
schools.

~~~
JJMcJ
Friend had a Japanese style abacus:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soroban#/media/File:Soroban.JP...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soroban#/media/File:Soroban.JPG)

I played around with it a bit, it was great fun but no match for Excel.

~~~
JJMcJ
And there are abacuses very similar in usage in Roman times.

The Japanese ones, conforming to stereotype, seem to be the most elegant.

------
csa
A friend of mine’s father did mental (abacus) math competitions when he was
younger. We were chatting about it, and he suggested I test him.

I started off with some easy ones, and he nailed them. I went up to 5 and six
digit numbers (different operations, no less), and he still nailed them. He
mocked me for speaking so slowly, but my Japanese was pretty fast, especially
for something as easy as numbers (not auctioneer fast, but still...).

All I can say is that I was thoroughly impressed. He had the correct answer
within a fraction of a second of me finishing my last number every time.

To make it “tougher”, he suggested we do it in English. His spoken English was
not very good, but his listening may have been ok.

He nailed the simple stuff, but I was able to break him a few times by going
over 10,000. Japanese counting uses base 10k, while English counting uses base
1k, so it throw him off a bit — he didn’t slow down enough to process exactly
what I was saying. That said, I’m sure he could have nailed the English
version just as well as the Japanese with just a little bit of practice.

If you ever get a chance to meet these mental soroban folks, I encourage you
to ask them about their experiences.

------
SECProto
[citation needed]

If you read the article, it specifies that advanced soroban is taught in some
private school, and that it was phased out in the 1970s. Currently elementary
students get a total of 4 hours of instruction spread over grade 3 and 4
(which is probably just enough that, a couple years later, they would still
know what it is). So while the title is grammatically correct, it is also
misleading.

~~~
mikekchar
I'm very confused... I don't have access to the article because I don't want
to make an account... But is it implying that soroban is not taught in
schools? Because that is incorrect. It totally depends on the school, but the
high school I taught in had an elective class in advanced soroban. Part of the
class was passing a certain kentei level (I can't remember which one). We even
had a soroban _club_ and it was quite popular (about 25 people). In the
countryside soroban are still used by some businesses so it is considered a
reasonable skill to have. Anyway, the school I taught at was not an academic
school, so most people didn't go to university. It had a business section for
students intending to take over their parent's shop, etc. Most of the students
in the business section took the soroban class (it might have even been all of
them). In addition to soroban, they had classes in Excel and even SQL --
though no other programming language.

~~~
mosselman
You don't have to make an account to access the article.

If you have reached your max number of articles, try clearing all cookies or
using a private window or a different browser.

Firefox has 'containers' which have isolated cookies, you can open news sites
like these in a separate container. If you want to take it 1 step further, you
can install Firefox's 'Multi-Account Containers' add-on and tell it to open
certain websites in a container by default. When you run into the limit, just
clear the cookies of that container.

------
noonespecial
I started my kids with abacus as soon as they could count.

It gave them great intuitive understanding of arithmetic later.

Highly recommend.

~~~
jacobolus
As an alternative, let me recommend teaching kids to use a free-form counting-
board type abacus. All you need is a pile of pennies (or pebbles, buttons,
plastic tokens, ...) and some lines drawn on a surface (e.g. drawn in the dirt
with a stick, or drawn on paper).

These counting boards were still the standard tool in Europe until a few
centuries ago, but their use has been completely wiped out and nearly
forgotten in a short time, since the popularization of Indo-Arabic numerals
and cheap access to paper.

The way it works is that parallel lines are drawn on the surface, and counters
on the line represent 1, 10, 100, etc., while counters in between the lines
represent 5, 50, 500, etc. In normalized form you only ever have up to 4
counters on a line. But there is no hard requirement that numbers be
normalized, and you can pile as many counters as you like on one line and
still have a meaningful state of the board.

Using the counting board then consists of first plonking down counters in the
easiest representation of your result (e.g. to add 22 + 34 put 2 + 4 counters
on the ones line and 2 + 3 counters on the tens line), and then undertaking a
series of transformations which preserve the value of the whole board but move
between equivalent representations (e.g. trade 5 ones for 1 five and trade 5
tens for 1 fifty), until you get to a representation which is convenient as
output.

This is closer to most types of mathematical/computational activity in later
mathematics, where various manipulation is done which at each step preserves
some invariants. It is also good preparation for thinking about the relation
between data structures and algorithms.

The big problem with the beads-on-rods version is that there is only one
possible representation of each number. So the act of trading different
magnitudes of counters is always left implicit. This makes it both harder to
learn and less flexible as a tool, with the advantage that in the hands of a
serious expert it’s probably marginally faster. If the goal were to train a
19th century accountant or shopkeeper this might be a fair trade-off, but for
promoting understanding I think it’s not worth it.

* * *

If you want to save some tokens and make the system still more powerful, add a
perpendicular line down the middle of the parallel lines. On one side tokens
represent positive counts and on the other side they represent negative
counts. Now in addition to the rules about trading 5 ones for 1 five or 2
fives for 1 ten, there is an additional rule that the same number of counters
on opposite sides of the line represent 0 in combination (so any number of
counters can be added or removed from both sides equally without changing the
meaning of the configuration).

This adds is an additional convenient way to normalize numbers: try to
maximally reduce the number of tokens used, allowing some negative "digits".
We represent 3 as 5 – 2, 8 as 10 – 2, etc. Pick whatever convention you like
for whether to round 5 up or down. In this representation, rounding a number
is particularly easy: just truncate.

This is something which cannot be done on a beads-on-rods soroban, but is very
helpful for understanding the meaning of negative numbers, the relation of
addition and subtraction, etc.

~~~
rauhl
The tokens used on such a counting-board are called jettons. I’ll second your
recommendation, and add my own next step: moving on to using a slide rule.
Seriously, seeing how real numbers move on a slide rule really helped give me
a feeling for how they ‘dance’ in calculations.

I _think_
[http://www.mernick.org.uk/lnc/jetton/jetton.htm](http://www.mernick.org.uk/lnc/jetton/jetton.htm)
was a good reference I found when I first used jettons, but it’s been so many
years now that I can’t say for sure.
[http://www.chicagocoinclub.org/projects/PiN/juh.html](http://www.chicagocoinclub.org/projects/PiN/juh.html)
has some information too.

~~~
jacobolus
Here’s a book about the subject, but it focuses as much on specific counters
in museums and collections as it does on their usage,
[https://amzn.com/0907498000](https://amzn.com/0907498000)

------
laurieg
Somewhere, there is a Japanese news website with the headline "Marksmanship
taught in American schools".

Yes, this is true in a sense but it is definitely hyping up the "mysterious
Japan" angle.

------
zwayhowder
My son did after school classes in abacus and learned how to use do the maths
without the abacus, using his hands or just mentally. Even now almost a decade
later her can still do some pretty impressive maths in his head using those
skills. Or even more impressive is his ability tally quickly. Just today we
were talking about how most animals have a common, short name and a longer
scientific one. As an example we used a spider near us, it's scientific name
is eriophora transmarina and he commented in about two seconds that it had 8
syllables in its name, the same as its full common name. I don't know about
others but I had to count three times before I was sure it was 8.

~~~
yawaramin
Isn't eriophora transmarina 9 syllables? (Btw, I'm in awe of people who can do
mental abacus calculations.)

------
Iv
Find it weird? How about this: Hand writing is still the primary writing tool
being taught at school. And not just in Japan.

I wont deny that handwriting is useful, but having it taught as the primary
writing skill, the first and main one, while the keyboard, the device that
will probably be used 95% of the time people have to write something in their
lives, is still seen as a niche skill is shocking to me.

~~~
jacobolus
Training young humans in basic manual dexterity seems pretty reasonable to me.
It would be good to require more manual training than just minimal and
mediocre handwriting practice, and get young people folding origami, sewing,
drawing, sculpting clay, cutting food with a knife, using chopsticks, playing
musical instruments, tying knots, ...

Paper furthermore remains a much more flexible and fluent tool than computer
interfaces for a wide variety of tasks.

~~~
Iv
We do far more than train them with "mediocre handwriting". We introduce
letters by showing script (which is a confusing style almost never used
anywhere in the real world) and insist for years on the correct shape to use
on this totally obsolete style.

Any of the activity you mention would be a better way to train manual
dexterity.

~~~
jacobolus
This varies a lot from place to place. My school mostly focused on print
letters, and didn’t provide much useful guidance to students. I agree the
typical American “cursive” letters are quite terrible, and that in many places
pedagogy is not very effective.

Personally I think students should learn some type of simplified italic-type
script, using a pen with ink that flows well enough that they don’t need to
use much pressure.

------
pmoriarty
I got really interested in the soroban at one point, and taught myself how to
do basic arithmetic on it, with the ultimate goal of being able to do quick
mental math. Unfortunately, I got bored after a while and never did achieve my
ultimate objective and now don't really remember how to do it. It's one of
those "use it or lose it" skills.

However, I do still have links to some of my favorite videos showing some
really amazing soroban or flash anazn feats:

Soroban - All in the mind[1], Flash Anzan at the All-Japan National Soroban
Championship 2012[2], and Mental Arithmetic World Champion - Flash Anzan[3]

There's an excellent, free book on it: Abaucs: Mystery of the Bead[4]

r/soroban and r/mentalmath are worth peeking in to.

I also really enjoyed reading a blog called Going Gaijin, written by a woman
who took formal soroban classes in Japan.[5]

There are a lot of cheap, decent sorobans on amazon and ebay, if you want a
physical device. I also found the "Simple Soroban" Android app to be useful
for practice.

[1] -
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Px_hvzYS3_Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Px_hvzYS3_Y)

[2] -
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ktpme4xcoQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ktpme4xcoQ)

[3] -
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JawF0cv50Lk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JawF0cv50Lk)

[4] - [http://totton.idirect.com/abacus/](http://totton.idirect.com/abacus/)

[5] -
[http://goinggaijin.com/2014/04/28/392/](http://goinggaijin.com/2014/04/28/392/)

------
mosselman
When my daughter was born she was gifted an abacus by my brother. She loves to
play with it because of the colours of the beads and the sound they make.

I was looking at it at some point and realised that when you use the beads as
numbers, rather than counting them, you can go incredibly high. I must have
known this earlier in life, but I completely forgot about it. After this I
heard a lot about the benefits to learning maths with an abacus versus
learning how to do math with a calculator. One of the claimed benefits is
that, when you learn maths with an abacus, you get better at doing
calculations mentally, whereas if you learn math with a calculator you don't
become better at that.

Does anyone know of a good resource to learn how to do math with an abacus? I
know I can just duckduckgo it, but maybe there is some exceptionally good
source somewhere?

------
jdshaffer
As others have rightly pointed out, it's not really taught in the schools here
(in Japan). All three of my kids went (and are still going through) public
schooling. I think they took a soroban to school for just a couple days and
that was about it. They still can't use one.

However, many parents want to send their kids to soroban classes after school,
especially when they're around ages 7-11 or so. There's a feeling that it
makes you much faster with arithmetic. My wife (Japanese) is very quick at
doing sums in her head.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
Should doing arithmetic quickly in ones head be considered a virtue? I wish
math classes would focus more on the abstraction aspect and less on
calculation.

~~~
Baeocystin
Not that I disagree about wanting more of the abstraction taught, but
absolutely, 100% yes. Accurate, rapid mental math is a core life skill, and
the lack of it causes people real problems.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
There are many people who are bad/slow at calculation and amazing at math;
many of them have math PhDs even. Ya, they might use a calculator in their
daily life, but those are cheap anyways.

It would be nice to get an ALU implanted in my brain, it would be much more
efficient for calculation than using a neural network.

~~~
Baeocystin
Mental math skills are for prosaic daily-life problems, and have almost
nothing to do with mathematics as a discipline. (Being good at spelling on its
own does not make one a good writer.) Not needing a calculator at the grocery
store to figure out which of some competing products are cheaper per unit
mass, or figure out change + tip at a restaurant is useful knowledge.

------
euske
My mom was in a high school abacus club back then. When she told me a story
that she went to a tournament as a part of the school team, my response was
"what the heck is an abacus competition!?" Competitive abacus is already
quaint enough to most Japanese people, but I imagine it was a bit like today's
e-sports. She said it really trains your mental arithmetic skill, and indeed
she's been extremely good at adding up 6 or 7-digit numbers in her 70s. She
passed away last year.

------
AlexDragusin
I have a soroban and it's amazing how fast one can compute without electronics
and I am no expert at it. On top of that, it exposes a certain way of working
with numbers that is very helpful for mental computations.

On top of everything you get a nice tactile feeling with it. Will it replace
my desk calculator, probably not, but it could.

------
JohnFen
When I was in grade school, I got a book about how to use the abacus and
taught myself. I got really good at it, too. It's too bad I didn't stay in
practice, really, maybe I should pick it up again.

If my school had offered this, I would have found it useful.

------
inawarminister
I am an Indonesian, and we also learned Abacus in the first and second grade.
At my time anyway

It is quite useful for quick mental addition and subtraction. How do you
multiply and divide using an abacus though?

------
devxpy
In typical Indian fashion, we have expensive private tuitions for nearly
everything - [http://ucmas.in/](http://ucmas.in/)

------
mruts
I use the Trachtenberg speed system of mathematics to do mental math. I can
reliably do any 2 digit by 2 digit number and most of the time do 3 by 3 digit
numbers. Does anyone know if it’s possible for an adult (I’m 26) to do better
with soroban training? The book I had as a kid (translated from japanese) said
I would never get good at it after the age of 12.. but that sounds kind of
defeatist to me.

~~~
Aeolun
I think they just write that so kids feel more compelled to put in an effort.
It may be a bit harder as an adult, but by no means impossible (especially if
your goal is 3 or 4 digit numbers).

------
Bhagaban
The new generation probably would rather use an 'Abacus app' , than use an
actual Abacus.

