I am wondering how what language you grow up with affects how you learn mathematics and other subjects?

Question

My question comes from looking at a math test scores graph of the world's children. All the English speaking countries were at the bottom. I am learning Spanish currently and it amazes me how easy it would be to teach an emerging reader how to read in Spanish. The language is so phonetic and you can sound things out so easily. Could our lower math ability be realated to how much time and effort it takes to teach a child to read and spell compared to other languanges?

Answer 1

I doubt that because many other languages are MUCH harder to master than English. For example, any slavic language is much harder to learn with very difficult pronunciation and numerous case endings and verb forms with imperfect and perfective aspects. It is very confusing! I don't know where those countries stand in the rankings, but I doubt that is the reason. I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that many other countries just have more strict educational systems than ours and students are almost forced to do better. Although, that is not always the case, who knows!

Answer 2

Unfortunately, language has nothing to do with mathematic skills. It's our education systems that are in a slump. English-speaking countries are on top of the world, so they don't feel the pressure from other countries to "look better." Other countries, such as Japan and China, that are seen as emerging world powers, feel the need to "overqualify" themselves to show off.

Granted, our brains can only do as much as we're born with. That's another factor. There are some geniuses that come from America and some not-so-smart people from China. It's all genetics, in the end.

But, that being said, there's a theory called "linguistic determinism" (also called "The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis") that talks about how language changes our perception of the world. Studies have shown that languages that use classifiers (words at the end of nouns to describe what category that noun is in - wood, small, etc) tend to depend highly on those classifiers when judging how small/large/squishy/resilient that object is, even if it doesn't look any different from another object that has a different classifier.

More info on the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapir-whorf

What you're mostly talking about though, is the writing system of other languages. In my opinion, kids can learn their languages' writing system as easily as other kids. I mean, look at China - they have to memorize thousands of characters to be able to read the paper, and yet they all manage it somehow. Polish seems impossible to read, yet kids can decode it. Yeah, us Americans have spelling bees to test our knowledge and Italians don't even have a common word for "spelling" (their language is phonetic too), but that doesn't mean we understand less of spelling than the Italians do.