
Negative Impact of English on Math Learning - ghosh
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-best-language-for-math-1410304008
======
eveningcoffee
The same should then also apply to the German.

French is even worse with their sixty ten (70) and four twenty (80) and four
twenty eleven (91).

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.

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.

I also think that kids should be introduced to some other numerical system
beside decimal in their early years.

~~~
douche
On the other hand, for other purposes, German is a far more regular and
logical language than English. Generally, complicated nouns and verbs are
composed of simpler nouns and verbs. Quite often, the German word for a thing
is a pretty bald description of what it is, whereas the English word often is
some sort of one-off, where it is not a loan-word stolen from some other
language:

Panzerkampfwagen = Armored battle wagon

Tank = (British code word that stuck for some reason)

or

Schreibtisch = writing table

Desk = ?

~~~
rawTruthHurts
True that. Enjoy those genders and plurals!!

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weland
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.

~~~
aurorain
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.

~~~
vorg
> 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.

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enknamel
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.

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kmicklas
> Chinese has just nine number names, while English has more than two dozen
> unique number words.

Wut. Chinese has zero through nine, then ten, hundred, thousand, ten thousand,
one hundred million. That's fifteen. Certainly better than English, still.

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gohrt
[http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html)

Submarine for game company featured in the story.

The story names the companies and games for sale, but doesn't name the
research papers.

------
josu
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:

FRENCH

France: 495

Switzerland: 531

Luxembourg[2]: 490

SPANISH

Spain: 484

Chile: 423

Mexico: 413

Peru: 368

PORTUGUESE

Portugal: 487

Brazil: 391

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.

[1] [http://www.oecd.org/pisa/keyfindings/pisa-2012-results-
overv...](http://www.oecd.org/pisa/keyfindings/pisa-2012-results-overview.pdf)
[2] At secondary school, in general, until the 9th class every subject is in
German, except mathematics and sciences (in French)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multilingualism_in_Luxembourg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multilingualism_in_Luxembourg)

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ajuc
PISA Maths exams results from 2012:

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

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.

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).

I wouldn't attribute the US education problems to the language.

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alexhoduski
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.

~~~
gizmo686
>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.

People have tried. Check out "In The Land of Invented Languages" [0] if this
interests you. Specific to your point, I would refer you to Lojban (a
derivative of Loglan).

[0][http://www.amazon.com/Land-Invented-Languages-Adventures-
Lin...](http://www.amazon.com/Land-Invented-Languages-Adventures-
Linguistic/dp/0812980891)

------
pcote
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?

Tenty-one, tenty-two, ect? No. It sounds two much like twenty-one, twenty-two,
and so on.

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.

It would be a simple solution to the tens problem but hard with respect to
getting people to adopt it.

~~~
panglott
It also solves only half the "problem", since each decade still has its own
name.

~~~
vorg
Most decades have the same name. The only ones different are "twen" for "two",
"thir" for "three", and "fif" for "five", which all sound very similar anyway
so there's not really a problem.

~~~
Todd
If we follow existing practice of thir-teen, four-teen, etc. why don't we just
use teen as the base? Teeny-one, teeny-two, teeny-three...

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readymade
No link to the original research, or any input from linguists? Puhleeeze.

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Grue3
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.

------
panglott
I love a lot of this new reasearch on the relationship between language and
cognition, but.

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.

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.
[http://www.slate.com/blogs/lexicon_valley/2013/10/16/piraha_...](http://www.slate.com/blogs/lexicon_valley/2013/10/16/piraha_cognitive_anumeracy_in_a_language_without_numbers.html)

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".

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.

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.

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 =/
[http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/02/how-
the...](http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/02/how-the-english-
language-is-holding-kids-back/385291/)

~~~
planfaster
Wen u sa u wont too improov thee Englush orthografee doo u meen speling
foneticulee? Beecuz ay think that wood bee silee.

Instead, why not teach the English language properly to students? You know,
where the words came from, what changes they suffered through the years...
That's how I learned it as a non-native speaker and I can tell you I had a
blast doing it, not to mention that now I literally can't forget how most
words are spelled (I remember vaguely the derivation from Latin/Greek/Middle
English/Anglo Saxon).

In other words, folks everywhere through the times were able to pick up this
beautiful language, but all of a sudden we are having problems teaching it to
kids these days? Is it the fault of the language, or the educators?

~~~
Armisael16
Do you really think preschoolers/kindergartners are going to get anything out
of that? I certainly wouldn't've cared.

~~~
planfaster
I don't believe that kids should be in school before 7 or 8 years of age.

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panglott
Semi-relatedly, I've wondered why coders haven't adopted something like the
tonal system for hexadecimal. [http://panglott.blogspot.com/2010/01/nystroms-
hexadecimal-nu...](http://panglott.blogspot.com/2010/01/nystroms-hexadecimal-
numeral-system-and.html)

~~~
panglott
Obligatory fleventy-five reference:
[https://panglott.wordpress.com/2015/01/27/fleventy-
five/](https://panglott.wordpress.com/2015/01/27/fleventy-five/)

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Mz
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.

~~~
tomsthumb
> 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

sounds pretty smart

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toolslive
Isn't this a form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis ?
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity)

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walshemj
Isn't that ironic (the title that is) as there is I am fairly sure more than
one math :-)

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steve371
sounds more like an excuse.

