Why Asians are Often Better at Math

I'm not quite sure why my comment about asian parents hitting their kids when they don't learn their math was deleted. The culture of corporal punishment in asia is totally different, and the ends to which it is used is totally different. There is a lot more riding on asian kids getting good at math than for american kids.

Does it help delicate western sensibilities if I point out I'm asian?

Based on this concept, I've created a base-100 number system that encodes each digit into a single simple syllable which is designed so that they can be strung into unambiguous sequences. So if your mental phonological loop can hold 10 fast syllables, you can hold the equivalent of 20 decimal digits in this system.

The system is logically arranged so it's pretty easy to memorize, and since it's base 100, the conversion to and from decimal is simple. The next step after is to memorize the addition and multiplication tables using them, which are of course much larger than in base 10. Once those become second nature, it should be possible to do mental arithmetic more quickly and with more mental registers to work with for larger numbers. I'm not nearly to that point yet, but it's a fun experiment.

If people are interested, I can toss what I have up on github and write up a detailed explanation of the system. So far, I have a few little HTML5 drills for learning to convert, and an Anki deck for the addition tables.

This is bullshit. The first example with memorizing the numbers doesn't work with Japanese - "hachi, ni, yon, roku, shichi, go, ichi" isn't faster than "eight, two, four, six, seven, five, one", but the Japanese are no different from the Chinese when it comes to their math prowess.

I don't understand why it's so hard for Americans to admit that Asian success in areas like math is simply because they work harder at it. In Asian cultures, there's a belief that your success is dependent on how hard you work, not your innate "intelligence". In America, if a child does well in school, he gets told over and over that he's smart, while a child who doesn't do well is told he's stupid. In Asia, if a child does well, he's told that he did a good job studying hard, while those who don't do well are told to try harder.

Let's be frank here:

Now I am Christian, but also being an evolutionist, even I can see the truth here:

North Asians are better at math than Europeans due to greater than two thousand years of Christian dysgenics.

> "hachi, ni, yon, roku, shichi, go, ichi" isn't faster than "eight, two, four, six, seven, five, one"

Japanese has two sets of numbers. One is the one you gave, which is based on Japanese, and the other got imported along with kanji from China. Using the shortest forms of the kun readings, it would be "ya, fu, yo, mu, na, i, hito". I don't know if a typical Japanese speaker would memorize them that way, but since those forms are ingrained in the language, they should be able to do so without significant effort.

Now, to an English speaker, it may look like a wash; both appear to be strings of eight syllables. But the kun-based numeral sounds are in fact quite a bit faster.