Posted by eoffg on October 04 2005 09:01 AM Hi Countess, and
welcome to the Forum! You write that the your Daughter loved
maths until it came to the magic number 10? This is a most
important issue, where I'll add some quotes from a research
paper by Joan A Cotter, which looks at the difference between
the Asian and Western approach to Maths: A difference is that of
naming numbers. Most Asian languages refer to 23, for example,
as "2-ten 3" and 67 as "6-ten 7." In English the quantity ten
has three names, ten, -teen and -ty. Another confusion are the
numbers, 11-19; words eleven and twelve seem to make no sense
and for the numbers from 13 to 19, the order is reversed with
the ones stated before the tens. All European languages have
some irregularities in naming numbers." So we have this
confusion at the basic level of the words that represent
numbers. Related to this, is understanding numbers as 'groups'?
Where the above Asian approach, where 23 is spoken as '2 ten 3'
highlights a different way of speaking and