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There’s a great book written about 20 years ago that compares the number systems that I can’t recall the name of at the moment. But some insights:
– spoken length of number word affects recall – for example reciting a telephone number. Compare the spanish words “u no” “quat tro” versus “one” and “four”.
– 4 year old english speaking kids struggle to count and fail in the teens due to having to memorize more words whereas kids in China can count up to 40. This is due to having to memorize more words like “eleven”, “twelve”, “thirteen”, … “nineteen”.
– Adding is logical in Chinese. They use “one ten one”, “one ten two” for 11 and 12. So kids learn to add each column up (the tens and ones columns).
– French has some quirks. They even throw in multiplication for describing “80”. “80” is “quatre-vingts dix” which is 4 x 20. But there’s a lot of famous french mathematicians so maybe this complexity is a good thing.
– There was a country that tried to switch to the more logical number system (Ireland? Scotland?) but failed – due to something about choosing new spoken number words that were too long.
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