I came across an interesting bit on how English language could hamper mathematical learning. Take the counting system for example, Chinese is one of the best (simplified, logical) system as it's clear the numerical ladder is built on '10'. Our eleven is 10+1, twenty is 2x10 etc. while English injects irregular terms such as 'eleven', 'twelve', 'twenty' rather than 'oneteen','twoteen' and 'twoty'. I'm not sure about French as their counting system is more complicated, eg. 80 is quatre-vingts, as in 4x20. Read more here:
English words may hinder math skills developmentOn a side note, it's interesting to do cross culture comparisons but imagine making a living on it! Publish or perish conundrum returns.Published studies should also be taken with a grain of salt as one might well be forcing results in the direction of thesis, eliminating complex variables. As you know English kids probably hang too much of their life on calculators for good. Wouldn't that be the dominant factor. Culture or nurture?
Something else here under the discussion title
'Why use kanji?' (for Japanese learners). Please ignore any political subcontext/provocation and focus on the linguistic point of view. The essential idea is that logogram ('shapes',like kanji) is more efficiently recognized compared to phonogram (alphabets, like the kanas) as our brain processes shapes and sounds differently, the latter more prone to damage. That's why dyslectics can still read logograms but not phonograms.
Excerpt (written by
Takasugi Shinji)
- btw, someone tell me the html code for quote please!
It's a common misunderstanding that logograms are obsolete and phonograms are modern. In fact, linguists have proven that a human being can read logograms faster than phonograms if trained to read. There are some Japanese who have been trying to write Japanese only in kana or only in alphabets with no success. If you write Japanese without kanji, you will forget the meanings of morphemes. The disadvantage of logograms is their difficulty to learn, but the fact that developed nations such as Japan and Taiwan have a very low illiteracy rate indicates it is not so hard to learn kanji as you might think, if good education is available.
The reason why most people in the world don't use logograms is that it needs hundreds of years to build a writing system based on logograms. Ancient people who invented first characters had a plenty of time, and the Japanese are the only major people who have successfully integrated foreign logograms into their native language. On the other hand, importing phonograms is very easy. The problem of using phonograms is the gap between spelling and pronunciation caused by inevitable pronunciation change. Do you know Japan had a different orthography of kana before World War II? Japan easily changed its orthography of kana after the war because that didn't affect most words that have kanji. If Japanese had given up kanji long ago and used only kana, the orthography wouldn't have been changed, and the sentence "今日 (きょう) 東京 (とうきょう) で洋服 (ようふく) を買 (か) った" (I bought clothes in Tôkyô today) would be: けふ とうきやうで やうふくを かつた. The gap between spelling and pronunciation would be wide.
