

Rice Paddies And Math Tests - cellis
http://www.gladwell.com/outliers/outliers_excerpt3.html

======
divia
I'd be interested to see some data on how children learning math in Hindi do,
because the numbers are even less regular, enough so that even though there's
a pattern, you still have to learn all the numbers from 1-100 individually.
There are also more specific words for different fractions, such as a word for
3/4 that sounds nothing like the word for 1/4.

<http://www.sf.airnet.ne.jp/~ts/language/number/hindi.html>

[http://faculty.maxwell.syr.edu/jishnu/101/numbersfractions/d...](http://faculty.maxwell.syr.edu/jishnu/101/numbersfractions/default.asp)

(My apologies if any of this is wrong. I'm not a native speaker, just took a
few years of Hindi in college.)

~~~
adi92
most schools in urban india and a large number of the rest are 'english-
medium'.. which means i learnt math in math class (in english) and learnt to
count in hindi in hindi class.. but never had to solve a math problem in hindi

i am currently learning japanese and can agree about the numbers being
syllablically small.. but this language has it own complexities -
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_counters> which require a speaker to
think a lot as well

~~~
epoweripi
I agree with the comment above. But there is a large rural population in India
that 'thinks numbers' in the native language.

May be the article is true only for numbers in the CJK (Chinese-Japense-
Korean) languages.

Atleast in the 3 Indian languages I know, numbers are bad in all of them - as
bad as it is in English.

~~~
eru
Turkish is good in this respect. They even have have regular numbers from 11
to 19.

~~~
yagiz
Yes, but the decades are not related to digits. Two is "iki" while twenty is
"yirmi".

~~~
eru
Yes. At least it's the relation is not visible to outsiders. Perhaps there's a
hidden relation?

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tomsaffell
Interesting article overall, but I found the following a little spurious:

>For fractions, we say three fifths. The Chinese is literally, 'out of five
parts, take three.' That's telling you conceptually what a fraction is. It's
differentiating the denominator and the numerator.

It's not obvious to me that one is better than the other, and he's not
providing data to support such a claim. Is it just me, or is he just playing
with semantics here?

~~~
Alex3917
Miller, K. F., Smith, C. M., Zhu, J. & Zhang, H. Preschool origins of cross-
national differences in mathematical competence: The role of number-naming
systems. Psychological Science, 6, 56-60.

~~~
tomsaffell
I just read this paper (it took me a while to get it) and it does not make any
reference to fractions _at all_. It only supports the first claim:

>That difference means that Asian children learn to count much faster. Four
year old Chinese children can count, on average, up to forty. American
children...

It does not support the second claim:

>The regularity of their number systems also means that Asian children can
perform basic functions—like addition—far more easily...

I don't have a copy of the book to hand (in India and haven't managed to find
it yet) - I can only see the online excerpt. Does he cite other papers in
support of the fractions claim and/or the second claim quoted above?

~~~
Alex3917
He only cites secondary sources in the book. I just linked to that paper
because I happened to know about it offhand. (Wrote a couple papers about it
in college.)

If you want to find the paper supporting the second claim, Gladwell explicitly
uses the keyword number-naming systems so that is a pretty big clue. There can
only be so many cognitive development papers with that as the independent
variable, so it should be pretty easy to find. It wouldn't surprise me if the
research supporting the second claim was done by the same researchers who did
the other paper I linked to.

~~~
tomsaffell
Thanks Alex. I guess I'll wait until I can get my hands on the book to find
out what sources he is citing.

------
noonespecial
Sounds fishy to me. In german, numbers are logical but excruciatingly long to
say in words. There's no huge lag in german math skills because it takes a
little longer to say the numbers than in english.

~~~
ced
123

Eins zwei drei

Hundert drei und zvanzig

Logical? (hope I didn't make a mistake there...)

~~~
silentbicycle
Looks right. IIRC (studied German in college), numbers are read similarly to
English, with the exception that the tens place is read last. Transliterated,
you would get something like "three thousand, four hundred, seven and ninety"
for 3,497.

------
blader
According to this logic, shouldn't kids from Kansas or Iowa do way better in
math?

I'm Chinese myself, and I think there might be a simpler reason. Our schools
public schools are way tougher. I'm talking 7 am to 5 pm, non stop learning
hard. We're talking about doing trig in the sixth grade and calculus in middle
school.

Those are the kinds of schools our parents went to and those are the kinds of
schools they send their kids to. Instead of soccer practice or baseball games
we take more math classes.

Also explains why we tend to suck at sports.

From my experience the difference in ability stems more from culture than from
genetics.

~~~
walterk
> From my experience the difference in ability stems more from culture than
> from genetics.

This is actually his point: the chapter from which this excerpt is taken is
from the second half of the book, which is all about how our behavior (and
thus our performance) is profoundly influenced by our cultural heritage.
There's a great chapter, for instance, on how cultural differences regarding
deference to authority resulted in Korean Air's high crash rate in the 90's.

There's no mention of the rice paddies in this excerpt, but Gladwell argues
that rice paddy cultivation was considerably more complex and required
considerably more labor than typical farming practices in the West, a long
history of which resulted in a culture of persistence. (Which might explain
just why Asian public schools are way tougher.)

~~~
blader
Guess I should have read the OP - you caught me - tl;dr

------
Dilpil
Ah yes, another hack who believes math is all about memorization and fast
arithmetic. Who cares if our 7 year olds can add slower? We all add the same
speed once we lift the calculator ban. And once you start doing real
(abstract) math, this memorization advantage becomes completely useless. I'll
believe the "Chinese Math Dominance" story when I see it.

~~~
mechanical_fish
You're not reading the hypothesis correctly:

 _Asian children, by contrast, don't face nearly that same sense of
bafflement... maybe that makes them a little more likely to enjoy math, and
maybe because they enjoy math a little more they try a little harder and take
more math classes and are more willing to do their homework, and on and on, in
a kind of virtuous circle._

The argument is not that the clarity of the Chinese-language numbers is, in
itself, that big of an advantage once kids grow beyond four, five, or seven
years of age. The argument is that kids who are comfortable with math at age
four are more likely to remain happy with math throughout the rest of their
schooling, whereas loss of confidence at an early age results in loss of
future confidence.

Obviously, while you can test the difference in math skills among seven-year-
olds, this stronger hypothesis is hard to test rigorously, because you can't
easily control for all the other cultural differences. But it's a very
interesting idea, nonetheless. One of the most amusing things about this
hypothesis is that it mirrors the difference between the English and Chinese
written languages: Chinese writing is badly designed compared to alphabetic
systems, to the point where there are serious effects on the literacy rate.
See Moser at <http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html> and DeFrancis'
_The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy_ , linked from
<http://www.pinyin.info/readings/chinese_language.html>

~~~
xiaoma
Pinyin.info is largely devoted to an anti-character crusade that doesn't
represent mainstream academic thought. Mark, if you're reading this, I don't
mean any disrespect to the work you've put into making the resource it is.
I've sent many people there for the rules on pinyin punctuation and spacing.

DeFrancis was the undisputed pre-eminent sinologist of his time, however many
of the literacy claims are unfounded. The truth of it is, China is a huge
country, full of people speaking dozens of different languages and the Chinese
writing system has helped its cohesion.

As a 6-year resident of Taiwan, I feel I have some capacity to comment on
this. Here we use traditional characters, which are more complex than those
currently in use in China, and despite not being as economically developed as
the US, Taiwan has a _higher_ literacy rate. Japan does, too. For that matter,
China's literacy rate is higher than other countries with similar levels of
economic development, such as Brazil.

Using characters entails some disadvantages, but also allows for some
benefits, such as increased reading speed and clearer differentiation of
homonyms.

FYI Moser has long since conquered his difficulties and become a literate
Chinese reader.

~~~
DaniFong
Taiwan is also mostly urban, whereas the literacy rate in China is reduced by
those from rural, far flung provinces.

~~~
xiaoma
That's why comparing China with developed countries and blaming any literacy
shortcomings on orthography just isn't fair.

~~~
DaniFong
Point taken.

------
speek
This is why we need to teach numbers and concepts, not names.

I admit that the English number system is flawed, but that's what digits are
for, right? 37 = 3(10s)7. Its just a shortcut, we can express 37 to be 3*10 +
7, but its just not worth saying every time

~~~
cellis
You still have to say "thirty seven", or mentally say "three times ten plus
seven", before you do the calculation.

~~~
interestedparty
I think his point, however, was that even an exclusive English speaker can
communicate (in writing) arithmetic calculations without involving English.
You don't have to 'mentally say' anything in English, so the inefficiency is
mitigated.

------
ken
I thought he had a good point, but then I realized his intro test was rigged:
twice he said "say them out loud", so I tried to memorize the sound of the
numbers.

But then I thought about how I remember passwords, PINs, and phone numbers,
and I don't memorize any of these by the sound of their digits (perhaps
because it would be so inefficient in English!).

I remember sequences of digits (or chars) by visualizing how I use them, i.e.,
spatially. In this case, I pretended the 7 digits made up a phone number and
mentally placed them on a phone. Now I can't seem to forget 485-3976.

------
ggrot
I disagree with the proof here. He implies that the two statements: Asian
children have a simpler number system vocabulary. \- and - Asian children
learn to count at a younger age.

prove the third:

A simpler number system vocabulary allows children to count at a younger age.

This may be true, but he implies it as fact, without even granting that they
may be other factors at work. Like a better education system perhaps.

------
ScottWhigham
Very interesting. I've never heard any breakdown of their being a different
approach to numbers in any system so that was neat.

------
mlLK
If you passed, post here; I've been doing math all night so I kinda cheated.
;)

~~~
ghshephard
If you think 4 8 5 3 9 7 6 (Which I think was the string) is hard to remember
at a glance, Try:

    
    
      FDC2:D343:5602:32:213:50FF:FE01:3842
    

I'd love to know what the cognitive impact of IPv6 has been on our ability to
remember long strings of numbers.

