"Why do Asian Countries Excel in Mathematics?"

We sometimes think of being good at mathematics as an innate ability. You either have it or you don’t. But to Schonfield, it’s not so much ability as attitude. You master mathematics if you are willing to try. That’s what Schoenfeld attempts to teach his students. Success is a function of persistence and doggedness and the willingness to work hard for twenty-thirty minutes to make sense of something that most people would give up on after thirty seconds.

Every four years an international group of educators administers a comprehensive mathematics and science test to elementary and junior high students around the world. It’s the TIMSS. And the point of the TIMSS is to compare the educational achievement of one country with another’s. It’s about 120 questions long. It’s so tedious and demanding that many students leave as many as ten or twenty questions blank. 

Now here’s the interesting part. As it turns out, the average number of items answered on that questionnaire varies from country to country. What do you think happens if you compare the questionnaire rankings with math rankings on the TIMSS? Countries whose students are willing to concentrate and sit still long enough and focus on answering every single question in an endless questionnaire are the same countries whose students do the best job of solving math problems. 

Think about this another way. Imagine that every year we have a Math Olympiad in some fabulous city. And every country in the world sent its own team of one thousand eighth graders. Erling Boe’s point is that we could predict precisely the order in which every country would finish in the Math Olympics without asking a single math question. All we have to do is give them some tasks measuring how hard they are willing to do the task. We wouldn’t have to even give them a task. We should be able to predict which countries are best at math simply by looking at which national cultures place the highest emphasis on effort and hard work. 

Then Who do you think is at the zenith of this heap? Countries in Japan, Singapore, China, and Taiwan. All Asian Countries. Why is that? Let's dig deeper. 

1. Attitude toward problem-solving

Fredrik Leung is a math educator and researcher who studies how culture affects students learning math. He says one of the reasons why China does so well in math is its Confucian culture. Professor Leong's project is called the trends in international mathematics and science study. Every four years they give a math test to students aged 10 to 14 in over 60 countries and regions consistently in the top five are Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. It's a culture that prizes hard work above all else. In this old Confucian culture, there's distress on education and this approach to education is very different from approaches in the west.

So in London when he interviews the parents and he asks them “ your child is not doing very well in mathematics why do you think it's the case?’ they say “ yes he's not very good in mathematics you know I was not good enough myself but he's very good in basketball or music or art.” In Beijing the same question to the parent answers look pretty different, oh he's lazy.

This is a big contrast to western parents who attribute more to the success and failure of their child especially in mathematics to innate ability. But in Chinese culture now, of course, the talents of children especially in mathematics differ but even if you are not so good in mathematics, if you put in enough effort you can do it. There's a proverb in Chinese “Practice makes perfect and diligence cures lack of talent”. 

According to one study, Chinese parents tend to spend more time with their kids on math and counting compared to American parents. So when Chinese kids enter kindergarten they are often ahead of their American counterparts in basic arithmetic. 

2. Asian people’s love for examinations.

This brings us to reason two why Chinese people are good at math and have an age-old love for examinations. An examination forms an important part of the establishment of Chinese culture. In ancient China, passing exams was one way to move up the social ladder and land a prestigious government job. They are the first country in the world with a national examination which started with the Sri dynasty. The exams had many levels and were extremely difficult to pass. They tested people on classic confusion texts law and politics. They have this very deep trust in examinations. To this day exams are how people get into universities and land government jobs in China which is why parents pay for cram schools. One study found that more than 90 percent of parents in China pay for cram schools making it a 383 billion-dollar industry in 2019.  It doesn't mean that they're good at math because they're Asian. They're good at math because they have very motivated parents that push them into all these different classes and tutoring and believe it or not some studies say it's easier to learn math and language.

3. Language as an important component of culture. 

Language as we all know is a very important component of culture and does language make a difference in terms of learning mathematics? Research has shown that some languages are better for learning math. There are some very trivial things like the number system taking the number 11 for example in English we have a unique word for it. But in Chinese, it is spoken as 10 and 1. It's the same in Arabic, Japanese, Korean, and Turkish.

This digit system is very very simple in Chinese which makes arithmetic very easy to learn. The other thing about the Chinese spoken language is that it's monosyllabic. This makes committing to memory easier. They don't call the tables, they call it a song. They also have a nine-factor song in Chinese which has tones that mean people remember things by sound. But once you've learned it, it's just like a song.

Now again there will be an argument that learning tables is pretty average-level mathematics. But it's very important when you try to do complicated mathematics if it eases your memory load and simply learning the language can train one's memory. But seriously, if you want to be influential with your communication and make things memorable. The easiest way to be memorable is to add melody to your voice. 

Let me ask you a question. How many of you have a favorite book that you have read over a few times?  Great. Now that you have answered the question, how many of you can recite each word of at least one page of the book? I am assuming none of us can do it! Now let me ask you another question: How many of you have a favorite song that you sing all the time? Once you have answered that, If I asked you to repeat word to word of the song, would you be able to do it? I am assuming at least 70% of people are able to do it.

So a song has roughly about 300 words, and a page of a book too has about 300-350 words. Why is it that we can repeat a song and not a page of a book roughly of about the same amount of words? The answer is melody. Melody makes memorizing easy. So when you add melody to your voice, what you say becomes more memorable. 

4) Learning language trains your memory

The Chinese language is very difficult to learn. It's what they call a logographic language. Each word is located in an imaginary square and each character contains many strokes that go in different directions. When kids learn Chinese they count each stroke while writing a character, Leong believes this helps wire the brain in ways that are useful later for learning math and geometry. The different languages affect how easy it is to memorize things, especially numbers but it's also that the different languages sort of codify your brains in different ways.

Chinese students often solve math problems using memory skills rather than tackling them step by step. To get good at mental arithmetic you need to memorize about 60 things, you need to memorize about 50 tables, and then a few of these number bonds like basic sums of digits. Memory is the basic ingredient when you learn mathematics. A new study in neuroscience is telling us that because of our experience of a language our brains are programmed differently when we do mathematics and that may explain why these Chinese students are so good at mathematics. 

Malcolm Gladwell's theory

The reason China is so good at math is its language.  Take a look at the following numbers. 

8 7 4 3 5 6 9

Say them out loud. Spend twenty seconds memorizing these numbers.  Now, say them back. You had about a fifty-fifty chance of saying that correctly. If you’re Chinese, however, you are practically guaranteed to get it right every single time. Malcolm Gladwell explains it quite succinctly, in Outliers: “.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 — [8, 7, 4,  3, 5, 6, 9] — right almost every time because,  unlike English, their language allows them to fit all those seven numbers into two seconds. 

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 is “qi”). Their English equivalents — “four,”   “seven” — are longer: pronouncing them  takes about one-third of a second.”  Basically, the Chinese language makes it easier to memorize strings of numbers. 

And that’s not all. The Chinese system of double-digit numbers is also a lot more efficient and intuitive. For example, in English, we say “eleven”.  In Chinese, it’s “ten-one”. In English, we say, “twenty-two”.  In Chinese, it’s “two-tens two”. This means the average Chinese-speaking four-year-old can count to forty, while the average English-speaking four years old can only count to fifteen. It takes a full year for those four-year-old English-speaking children to be able to learn to count to forty. 

And wait! There’s more! That same system of saying the place systems out loud helps in basic arithmetic. For example, if a child is asked on a test,   “what’s twenty-three plus forty-two”, they have to convert the letters to numbers and add.  In Chinese, however, it’s “what’s two tens three plus four tens two”,   meaning the equation is already printed, with no conversion to numbers necessary. 

Another factor is that the Asian work ethic is much stronger than the average American’s.  For example, many people in Asia are farmers. The average rice-paddy farmer works about three-thousand hours in a single year.  In comparison, the average American employee works about 1750 hours in a year, and the average German works about 1350 hours. T

To Asians, academics come first, whereas, in many other countries, schools emphasize sports and extracurricular activities.  In Asia, most people don’t think that some people are born with the ability to be good at math; rather, they think that there’s nothing that hard work can’t remedy.  Plus, the average Asian school year can be up to 60 days longer than the American one. 

Add that to the fact that many Asians start school earlier than elsewhere, and you have a pretty good reason why Asians perform so much better at mathematics than others do.  Oh, and by the way: you might’ve noticed that America won 4 of the last 6 Olympiads. Their teams were mainly composed of Asian students. 

And that, my friends, is why Asians are widely renowned for their math abilities.