Why are Asians so good at math?

I just finished reading this book called “Outliers” by Malcom Gladwell in which he essentially discusses which factors contribute to a high level of success. Those who are successful aren’t just born successful or they just work extremely hard but they were given opportunities and had a sprinkle of “luck” as well. Instead of giving a synopsis, I really encourage you to just read the book and open your mind.. because it will be blown.

In Chapter 8 of “Outliers”, Gladwell covers the Chinese culture in terms of their agriculture duties in the rice paddies, their discipline, and why they excel in the math department. My father being of Asian decent (technically Pacific Islander but whatever) and my mother being Hispanic, I can definitely relate to what Gladwell is speaking about. Anyways, according to Gladwell, the reason Asians (specifically Chinese) are so much better than Western countries is because of how they say the numbers. See the this excerpt from the book below:

Take a look at the following list of numbers: 4,8,5,3,9,7,6. Read them out loud to yourself. Now look away, and spend twenty seconds memorizing that sequence before saying them out loud again.

If you speak English, you have about a 50 percent chance of remembering 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 about two seconds. We most easily memorize whatever we can say or read within that two second span. And Chinese speakers get that list of numbers—4,8,5,3,9,7,6—right every time because—unlike English speakers—their language allows them to fit all those seven numbers into two seconds.

That example comes from Stanislas Dehaene’s book “The Number Sense,” and as Dehaene 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—”four,” “seven”—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. In languages as diverse as Welsh, Arabic, Chinese, English and Hebrew, there is a reproducible correlation between the time required to pronounce numbers in a given language and the memory span of its speakers. In this domain, the prize for efficacy goes to the Cantonese dialect of Chinese, whose brevity grants residents of Hong Kong a rocketing memory span of about 10 digits.

There also appears to be a distinct difference in how number- naming systems in Westerns and Asian languages are constructed. What’s crazy to me is that we typically think that Asians are smarter because they come from disciplined and strict cultures, where in fact, the actual reason is stemmed from something much more simple. I’m not saying that strict parents and being discipline has nothing to do with it, but the language is the actual foundation as to why it’s easier for Asians to excel so well in math. See below for a much better and thorough explanation:

In English, we say fourteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen and nineteen, so one would think that we would also say one-teen, two-teen, and three-teen. But we don’t. We make up a different form: eleven, twelve, thirteen, and fifteen. Similarly, we have forty, and sixty, which sound like what they are. But we also say fifty and thirty and twenty, which sort of sound what they are but not really. And, for that matter, for numbers above twenty, we put the “decade” first and the unit number second: twenty-one, twenty-two. For the teens, though, we do it the other way around. We put the decade second and the unit number first: fourteen, seventeen, eighteen. 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-four is two ten four, and so on.

That difference means that Asian children learn to count much faster. Four year old Chinese children can count, on average, up to forty. American children, at that age, can only count to fifteen, and don’t reach forty until they’re five: by the age of five, in other words, American children are already a year behind their Asian counterparts in the most fundamental of math skills.

The regularity of their number systems also means that Asian children can perform basic functions—like addition—far more easily. Ask an English seven-year-old to add thirty-seven plus twenty two, in her head, and she has to convert the words to numbers (37 + 22). Only then can she do the math: 2 plus 7 is nine and 30 and 20 is 50, which makes 59. Ask an Asian child to add three-tens-seven and two tens-two, and then the necessary equation is right there, embedded in the sentence. No number translation is necessary: It’s five-tens nine.