Mandarin speaking children have ‘head start’ when learning maths, says bilingual nursery owner

Mr John believes that those who can speak Mandarin have a head start when it comes to learning maths. The language has a more binary structure than English and lends itself very well to computation, as he explains: “Chinese, and indeed other East Asian languages, have a much simpler mathematical structure in their language than we do. If you consider just the words we use to associate with numerals – you can learn one through ten relatively easily, but then you have to learn an entire new set for eleven through to twenty.” The language is also very good for young children as they need to learn less words. Mr John says: “The only numbers you need to learn in oral Chinese are one through ten, one hundred, one thousand, ten thousand and then 100 million. Twenty is just two tens. eleven is just 10+1. (more)