According to a growing body of research, different languages use different words for numbers, can affect how easily we learn to understand and count basic concepts such as fractions.
Children are presented with additional challenges when they take their first steps into the world of mathematics which is based on the language they speak, while others are offered a head start.
They may find it difficult to answer simple questions like, when comparing two numbers, which number is bigger or how many quarters in a half. While the effect is subtle, the deeper factors can be understood by exploring which will shape our math’s ability as well as allows many adults and children who struggle with math’s to see their problem in a new light.
If a child faces difficulties in counting, in English there is no systematic rule for the naming of numbers. After ten we have “eleven” and “twelve” and then the teens “thirteen”, “fourteen” and so on. You would be unable to just guess if you didn’t know the word for eleven and might come up with something like “one ten”.
Some english words reverse the numbers they refer to, such as the word “fourteen” puts the four first, even though it appears last in the number 14.
English speakers switch to a different pattern such as “twenty”, “thirty”, “forty” for multiples of 10. These words might take time for children to learn and understand, for example that thirteen is different from thirty. In the meantime, they may unconsciously try to make the pattern more regular, by fitting words like “five-teen” or “twenty-ten” into their counting sequence.
In Chinese, the number words lack these misdeeds. If you only know the words from one to ten, the you can easily infer all the others.
Kevin miller at the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champagne and colleagues in the mid-1990’s put the idea to the test by comparing the numerical abilities of four-and five- year- olds in the US and mainland China. They found that children from both countries were able to count up to 12, but the Chinese children were about a year ahead of the Americans in their capacity to count to higher numbers.
Further studies suggest that the basic logic of our “base-10’ counting system are grasped easily by the Chinese children. Since this is the fact that we use multiples of tens and units to represent numbers and that the order of the digits tells us which is which. This is more obvious in Chinese. er shi, “two-ten” is easily understood as 2 x 10 = 20. The English word “twenty” doesn’t spell this out so clearly.
Six-year-olds of various nationalities were given one set of blocks to represent tens and another set to represent units, to investigate whether this would make a difference to children’s understanding. Their chore was to use blocks to explain different quantities. With greater linguistic transparency, children in China and other East Asian countries were more likely to represent larger numbers using a combination of both sets of blocks. While children who spoke English, Swedish or French were more likely to count out the larger numbers in individual units.
