
U.S. math team finishes 4th behind Korea, China, Vietnam - lunaru
https://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2017/07/25/US-math-team-finishes-4th-behind-Korea-China-Vietnam-in-intl-competition/1791500960942/
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DomreiRoam
If you go to see the full results: [http://www.imo-
official.org/results.aspx](http://www.imo-official.org/results.aspx) , you can
see that asian country have a lot of good results. Do you know what the cause
is?

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ezoe
Probably for the complexity and irregularity of the number system their
languages use.

[http://www.sf.airnet.ne.jp/ts/language/number.html](http://www.sf.airnet.ne.jp/ts/language/number.html)

Asian language tend to use almost regular base of 10 number systems.

Other languages, like English, has historical debt on the language system.

French is especially bad.

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DomreiRoam
There is a study that shows that European languages can make number
acquisition and arithmetic more difficult and I noticed that sometime it's
easier for my daughter (5 year old) to do addition and subtraction in Khmer
than in French.

But I don't see how it would cause a problem long term for the best student. I
believe that STEM is still esteemed in Asia and less so in Europe.

