Why are Asians so good at Maths?

Why are Asians so good at Maths? Whether you admit it or not, being raised in Western countries, we are all familiar of the racial stereotypes that have traversed through our colorful history. For Asians, they are all good at maths, right? Psychologists have even gone so far as to propose an elaborate evolutionary theory involving the Himalayas, really cold weather, pre-modern hunting practices, brain size, and specialised vowel sounds to explain why Asians have higher IQs. The theory has been refuted by other experts, but the stereotype is true. For years, students from China, South Korea, and Japan – and the children of recent immigrants who are from those countries – have substantially outperformed their Western counterparts at mathematics. Why is that? In Asian countries, educational standards are set by the state. You could argue about the reasonableness or appropriateness of such particular standards. You could argue that they test in a way which may not promote true education. You could argue that they stifle creativity in learning. But, they exist, and there's no getting around it. Furthermore, the tests are clear and quantifiable, and that is where their strength lies. Every ‘group' involved in the educational enterprise – teachers, parents, and pupils – all understand exactly what is required to pass them. This has the rather powerful effect of putting all these groups on the "same team", so to speak, where the adversary is the test itself. That "teamwork" results in some very different social dynamics, particularly between teachers and pupils. In the West, the teacher is the educational authority who challenges students directly, and is therefore not simply a source of knowledge, but also a source of confrontation and conflict – and students often treat them accordingly. In Asia, on the other hand, teachers are more like coaches, helping the students to achieve high test scores the same way a running coach might help his team break speed records. In Asia, students are expected to shoot for the moon, especially in maths and science. Yet there aren't that many that aspire to be poets, filmmakers, movie stars, or footballers. Why do you think the most prolific, talented people in those areas come from the United States and the UK? Because, in the West, we try to value those creative aspects of the human psyche as much as any of the others. In China, Japan, and Korea they value cold, hard skills. In a recent survey, children in America and Asia were asked to fantasize about what they would like if they could have any wish. Over two thirds of Asian kids wished for something related to education and educational success. Only one in ten students in America wished for something related to education, choosing instead wealth, material objects, or fun fantasies, such as a trip to the moon. Clearly, the life of the Asian children is much more centered on school than the life of an American children. These factors all explain why Asians might be good at maths, but is it true that they have some kind of innate proclivity for the subject?  Take a look at the following list of numbers: 4,9,7,6,3,5,8. Read them out loud. Now look away and spend twenty seconds memorizing that sequence before saying them out loud again. Chances are, if you speak English, you have a 50 percent chance of memorizing that sequence perfectly. If you're Chinese, though, you're almost certain to get it right every time. Why is that? Because as human beings, we store digits in a memory loop that runs for approximately two seconds. We most easily memorise whatever we can say or read within that two-second span. And Chinese speakers get that list of numbers - 4,9,7,6,3,5,8 - right almost ever time because, unlike English, their language allows them to fit all those seven numbers into two seconds. As Stanislas Dehaene's book The Number Sense explains: Chinese number words are remarkably brief. Most of them can be uttered in less than one-quarter of a second (for instance, 4 is "si" and 7 "qi"). Their English equivalents are longer: pronouncing them takes about one-third of a second. The memory gap between English and Chinese apparently is entirely due to this difference in length. It turns out that there is also a big difference in how number-naming systems in Western and Asian languages are constructed. In English, we say fourteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, and nineteen, so one might expect that we would also say oneteen, twoteen, threeteen, and fiveteen. But we don't. We use a different form: eleven, twelve, thirteen, and fifteen. Similarly, we have forty and sixty, which sounds like the words they are related to (four and six). But we also say fifty and thirty and twenty, which sort of sound like five, three and two, but not really. The number system in English is highly irregular. Not so in China, Japan, and Korea. They have a logical counting system. Eleven is ten-one. Twelve is ten-two. Twenty-five is two-tens-five and so on. The regularity of their number system also means that Asian children can perform basic functions, such as addition, far more easily. Ask an English-speaking eight year-old too add thirty-seven and twenty-two in his head, and he has to convert the words to numbers (37 + 22). Only then can he do the maths: 2 plus 7 is 9 and 30 plus 20 is 50, which makes 59. Ask an Asian child to add three-tens-seven and two-tens-two, and the necessary equations is right there embedded in the sentence. No number translation is needed: it's five-tens-nine. This internal logic in counting numbers with Asian languages means Asian children learn to count much faster than English speaking children. By the age of five, they are already a year behind their Asian counterparts in the most fundamental of Maths skills. Disenchantment with mathematics among Western Children starts in years two and three. Perhaps a part of that disenchantment is due to the fact that maths doesn't seem to make sense; its linguistic structure is clumsy; its basic rules seem arbitrary and complicated. Asian children, by contrast, don't feel that same bafflement. They can hold more numbers in their heads and do calculations faster, and the way fractions are expressed corresponds exactly to the way a fraction is. It makes sense – and maybe that makes them a little more likely to enjoy maths, and maybe because they enjoy maths a little more, they try a little harder and study it for longer and are more willing to do their homework, and on and on, in a kind of virtuous circle. When it comes to maths, in other words, Asianshave a built-in advantage.