http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13560741/

Gladwell’s chapter is self contradictory – first claiming it is language, then claiming it is just stamina.

We believe that to be good in Math, one has to be strong in mental skills. Asian languages with root in Chinese are memory-intensive language. This is the reason why students from these countries are doing well in Math.

However, we believe that this is not going to be the same in next 10 to 20 years for 2 simple reasons:

1) The proliferation of calculators in schools is weakening the mental skills of students. Taking Singapore as example, caculators are allowed at the age of 10. Many students are now finding it hard to handle concepts such as fraction, decimals and percentage without calculator. As they move on to higher levels, they find topic such as algebra even harder to understand, since concept such as (x-4)/3 cannot be handled caculator.

2) Chinese language skills are also weakening in many countries, even in China. During my recent trips to China, I found many Chinese not familiar with idioms and phrases that we used to memorize when we were young. In Singapore, many students are opting a simpler syllabus of Chinese for their high school (known as Chinese B).

In summary, the overall weakening of mental skills is having the same impact on Math learing and Chinese learning.

Sorry for the rant… Happens from time-to-time! Great post Larry.

-Blake Gates

I wonder what the complex alphabet in Chinese compared to the simpler English alphabet does to the patterns of learning written language and how it might be a hindrance for certain tasks. At a simple level I would think it makes typing and using a computer difficult. From simple things I’ve read it seems that there are issues with Chinese keyboard design, and I wonder what is lost by having to expend mental energy on the typing issues of the language.

The parallel I think of is the Arabic numeral system versus Roman numeral system, and how which system you use controls what you can accomplish easily. For instance, long division with roman numerals strikes me as being incredibly complex. However it can be handled pretty easily on paper by 4th graders (probably younger outside US!) because it can just be done algorithmically with a simple procedure.

Why do I say this? Consider for example Korean numerals (I am referring to the set that was borrowed from Chinese). For the numbers 11-19, they all go “ten one”, “ten two”, … “ten nine” … However, the pronunciation of “ten” is not the same for all the numbers 11-19. (In particular, there is a phonetic change in the number 16.) So there is a question now: when a Korean child learns the number for 16, what is going on? Does he/she learn it as a new word because of the sound change, or is the sound change learnt as a separate rule. or something in-between? Does this mean that the “ten” in the numbers 11-19 is more of a prefix in Korean?

In linguistics there is a technical distinction between morpheme (smallest unit of meaning) and words (definition not so clear, considering German and their ultra-long compound words). Morphemes may or may not function as standalone words (i.e. they may have to be combined with another morpheme). So “-teen” and “-ty” would be morphemes and not words in English.

In Chinese, there is almost a one-to-one correspondence between morphemes and characters (although there are exceptions – the Chinese word for spider has two characters which have no meaning in and of themselves). However. in modern Chinese, most nouns are actually polysyllabic – very few Chinese characters can be used standalone as nouns. (Note that this is not the case with classical Chinese.) The pinyin romanization of Chinese recognizes this, and as a rule, words in Chinese are written without spaces in between the characters when transcribed into pinyin (eg Beijing not Bei Jing). What makes this complicated in this discussion is that the Chinese words for one to ten are exceptions in that they are morphemes (characters) that can function as standalone words.

So I don’t know what really goes on here. Is the the number of morphemes that must be learnt the determining factor, or the number of “words”? As I alluded to earlier, there isn’t a really good definitiion of what a word is, especially from a language acquisition perspective. (I am sure no one taught you the word “antidisestablishmentarianism”, but you can figure out what it means.)

Even in your Chinese example, the Chinese words for 11-19 are actually somewhat irregular. If you compare them with the words for 20-99, you realize that to be truly regular, the Chinese words for 11-19 should be “one ten one”, “one ten two”, etc. So a Chinese child needs to at the very least learn this fact – that 13 is “ten three”, not “one ten three”. I actually think (not sure though) that this is a common mistake that Chinese children make. So there is an additional piece of information here (just like in English one needs to learn to add “-teen” to make numbers from 13-19).

Sorry for the long post – I didn’t major in linguistics for nothing, I guess.

For the case of Japanese, the Japanese numbers exist from 1 to 10, so that is arguably 10 more numbers to be learnt (although there is the strangeness of having two words for each of those numbers, and figuring out when to use one and when to use the other – they are not always interchangeable).

In Korean, native numbers exist for 1 to 10, and then for 20, 30, 40, … 90. There are also native Korean words for 100, 1000 (and maybe beyond). Again, as in Japanese, the native set of numbers and the Chinese-derived set are not always interchangeable.

So I don’t know what this means for the hypothesis …

Another side note: languages like Chinese, Japanese and Korean have counters – so you can’t say “three apples”, you need to say “three of apples”. English only requires counters for uncountable nouns (“three pieces of paper”). One could argue that this makes learning harder for languages where counters are obligatory (or perhaps not, if one takes the view that learning the counter words does not interfere with acquiring numeracy skills).