I very rarely suggest edits to HN titles but I feel like adding "for two hours" makes the title a lot truer than the New York Times' one, and that after you have the true title with the "Wow, Japan, how charmingly inscrutable" removed from it, there is very little reason to read the rest of it.
Abacuses are a niche hobby in Japanese schools, in the same fashion that e.g. competitive poetry recital is a niche hobby in American schools, and are factually not taught in the fashion that e.g. poetry is taught in American schools.
A friend of mine’s father did mental (abacus) math competitions when he was younger. We were chatting about it, and he suggested I test him.
I started off with some easy ones, and he nailed them. I went up to 5 and six digit numbers (different operations, no less), and he still nailed them. He mocked me for speaking so slowly, but my Japanese was pretty fast, especially for something as easy as numbers (not auctioneer fast, but still...).
All I can say is that I was thoroughly impressed. He had the correct answer within a fraction of a second of me finishing my last number every time.
To make it “tougher”, he suggested we do it in English. His spoken English was not very good, but his listening may have been ok.
He nailed the simple stuff, but I was able to break him a few times by going over 10,000. Japanese counting uses base 10k, while English counting uses base 1k, so it throw him off a bit — he didn’t slow down enough to process exactly what I was saying. That said, I’m sure he could have nailed the English version just as well as the Japanese with just a little bit of practice.
If you ever get a chance to meet these mental soroban folks, I encourage you to ask them about their experiences.
If you read the article, it specifies that advanced soroban is taught in some private school, and that it was phased out in the 1970s. Currently elementary students get a total of 4 hours of instruction spread over grade 3 and 4 (which is probably just enough that, a couple years later, they would still know what it is). So while the title is grammatically correct, it is also misleading.
I'm very confused... I don't have access to the article because I don't want to make an account... But is it implying that soroban is not taught in schools? Because that is incorrect. It totally depends on the school, but the high school I taught in had an elective class in advanced soroban. Part of the class was passing a certain kentei level (I can't remember which one). We even had a soroban club and it was quite popular (about 25 people). In the countryside soroban are still used by some businesses so it is considered a reasonable skill to have. Anyway, the school I taught at was not an academic school, so most people didn't go to university. It had a business section for students intending to take over their parent's shop, etc. Most of the students in the business section took the soroban class (it might have even been all of them). In addition to soroban, they had classes in Excel and even SQL -- though no other programming language.
You don't have to make an account to access the article.
If you have reached your max number of articles, try clearing all cookies or using a private window or a different browser.
Firefox has 'containers' which have isolated cookies, you can open news sites like these in a separate container. If you want to take it 1 step further, you can install Firefox's 'Multi-Account Containers' add-on and tell it to open certain websites in a container by default. When you run into the limit, just clear the cookies of that container.
As an alternative, let me recommend teaching kids to use a free-form counting-board type abacus. All you need is a pile of pennies (or pebbles, buttons, plastic tokens, ...) and some lines drawn on a surface (e.g. drawn in the dirt with a stick, or drawn on paper).
These counting boards were still the standard tool in Europe until a few centuries ago, but their use has been completely wiped out and nearly forgotten in a short time, since the popularization of Indo-Arabic numerals and cheap access to paper.
The way it works is that parallel lines are drawn on the surface, and counters on the line represent 1, 10, 100, etc., while counters in between the lines represent 5, 50, 500, etc. In normalized form you only ever have up to 4 counters on a line. But there is no hard requirement that numbers be normalized, and you can pile as many counters as you like on one line and still have a meaningful state of the board.
Using the counting board then consists of first plonking down counters in the easiest representation of your result (e.g. to add 22 + 34 put 2 + 4 counters on the ones line and 2 + 3 counters on the tens line), and then undertaking a series of transformations which preserve the value of the whole board but move between equivalent representations (e.g. trade 5 ones for 1 five and trade 5 tens for 1 fifty), until you get to a representation which is convenient as output.
This is closer to most types of mathematical/computational activity in later mathematics, where various manipulation is done which at each step preserves some invariants. It is also good preparation for thinking about the relation between data structures and algorithms.
The big problem with the beads-on-rods version is that there is only one possible representation of each number. So the act of trading different magnitudes of counters is always left implicit. This makes it both harder to learn and less flexible as a tool, with the advantage that in the hands of a serious expert it’s probably marginally faster. If the goal were to train a 19th century accountant or shopkeeper this might be a fair trade-off, but for promoting understanding I think it’s not worth it.
* * *
If you want to save some tokens and make the system still more powerful, add a perpendicular line down the middle of the parallel lines. On one side tokens represent positive counts and on the other side they represent negative counts. Now in addition to the rules about trading 5 ones for 1 five or 2 fives for 1 ten, there is an additional rule that the same number of counters on opposite sides of the line represent 0 in combination (so any number of counters can be added or removed from both sides equally without changing the meaning of the configuration).
This adds is an additional convenient way to normalize numbers: try to maximally reduce the number of tokens used, allowing some negative "digits". We represent 3 as 5 – 2, 8 as 10 – 2, etc. Pick whatever convention you like for whether to round 5 up or down. In this representation, rounding a number is particularly easy: just truncate.
This is something which cannot be done on a beads-on-rods soroban, but is very helpful for understanding the meaning of negative numbers, the relation of addition and subtraction, etc.
The tokens used on such a counting-board are called jettons. I’ll second your recommendation, and add my own next step: moving on to using a slide rule. Seriously, seeing how real numbers move on a slide rule really helped give me a feeling for how they ‘dance’ in calculations.
Here’s a book about the subject, but it focuses as much on specific counters in museums and collections as it does on their usage, https://amzn.com/0907498000
It teaches place value but also expands the concept into all sorts of other areas of algebraic structure, including polynomials. It's actually quite similar to a counting board plus some interesting manipulation rule variations.
Yes, James Tanton’s exploding dots are more or less a counting board turned into a pencil (or whiteboard marker) & eraser tool, with more focus on concepts than practical calculation. Personally I find moving counters around to be easier than drawing and erasing little dots. YMMMV.
Having base ten arithmetic split into 5 × 2 (as was done historically) is convenient for practical use, but does slightly complicate the concept. Having a single number base as Tanton does makes explanations a bit simpler.
It’s nice how Tanton shows that counting boards can be used with alternative rules to represent more advanced/abstract systems of calculation. We can make up counting boards for doing complex arithmetic, working in other number fields, working with formal polynomials, working with binary logic, ...
Modern computer registers/memory aren’t much different than a (very large) counting board. When we combine a basic counting board with a human operator, we have a Turing-complete computing machine.
Interestingly, "manipulatives" are now part of mainstream match education in the US, for the early grades. But I don't know if it's standardized at all.
Yes, there are many types of “manipulatives”, and they have value as pedagogical tools, but most of them tend to be rather slow and ineffective practical tools, unlike an abacus (of either the counting board or sliding bead varieties) which is as or more efficient than pen and paper, or a slide rule, which is more efficient.
My son did after school classes in abacus and learned how to use do the maths without the abacus, using his hands or just mentally. Even now almost a decade later her can still do some pretty impressive maths in his head using those skills. Or even more impressive is his ability tally quickly.
Just today we were talking about how most animals have a common, short name and a longer scientific one. As an example we used a spider near us, it's scientific name is eriophora transmarina and he commented in about two seconds that it had 8 syllables in its name, the same as its full common name. I don't know about others but I had to count three times before I was sure it was 8.
Find it weird? How about this: Hand writing is still the primary writing tool being taught at school. And not just in Japan.
I wont deny that handwriting is useful, but having it taught as the primary writing skill, the first and main one, while the keyboard, the device that will probably be used 95% of the time people have to write something in their lives, is still seen as a niche skill is shocking to me.
Training young humans in basic manual dexterity seems pretty reasonable to me. It would be good to require more manual training than just minimal and mediocre handwriting practice, and get young people folding origami, sewing, drawing, sculpting clay, cutting food with a knife, using chopsticks, playing musical instruments, tying knots, ...
Paper furthermore remains a much more flexible and fluent tool than computer interfaces for a wide variety of tasks.
We do far more than train them with "mediocre handwriting". We introduce letters by showing script (which is a confusing style almost never used anywhere in the real world) and insist for years on the correct shape to use on this totally obsolete style.
Any of the activity you mention would be a better way to train manual dexterity.
This varies a lot from place to place. My school mostly focused on print letters, and didn’t provide much useful guidance to students. I agree the typical American “cursive” letters are quite terrible, and that in many places pedagogy is not very effective.
Personally I think students should learn some type of simplified italic-type script, using a pen with ink that flows well enough that they don’t need to use much pressure.
I got really interested in the soroban at one point, and taught myself how to do basic arithmetic on it, with the ultimate goal of being able to do quick mental math. Unfortunately, I got bored after a while and never did achieve my ultimate objective and now don't really remember how to do it. It's one of those "use it or lose it" skills.
However, I do still have links to some of my favorite videos showing some really amazing soroban or flash anazn feats:
Soroban - All in the mind[1], Flash Anzan at the All-Japan National Soroban Championship 2012[2], and Mental Arithmetic World Champion - Flash Anzan[3]
There's an excellent, free book on it: Abaucs: Mystery of the Bead[4]
r/soroban and r/mentalmath are worth peeking in to.
I also really enjoyed reading a blog called Going Gaijin, written by a woman who took formal soroban classes in Japan.[5]
There are a lot of cheap, decent sorobans on amazon and ebay, if you want a physical device. I also found the "Simple Soroban" Android app to be useful for practice.
When my daughter was born she was gifted an abacus by my brother. She loves to play with it because of the colours of the beads and the sound they make.
I was looking at it at some point and realised that when you use the beads as numbers, rather than counting them, you can go incredibly high. I must have known this earlier in life, but I completely forgot about it. After this I heard a lot about the benefits to learning maths with an abacus versus learning how to do math with a calculator. One of the claimed benefits is that, when you learn maths with an abacus, you get better at doing calculations mentally, whereas if you learn math with a calculator you don't become better at that.
Does anyone know of a good resource to learn how to do math with an abacus? I know I can just duckduckgo it, but maybe there is some exceptionally good source somewhere?
As others have rightly pointed out, it's not really taught in the schools here (in Japan). All three of my kids went (and are still going through) public schooling. I think they took a soroban to school for just a couple days and that was about it. They still can't use one.
However, many parents want to send their kids to soroban classes after school, especially when they're around ages 7-11 or so. There's a feeling that it makes you much faster with arithmetic. My wife (Japanese) is very quick at doing sums in her head.
Should doing arithmetic quickly in ones head be considered a virtue? I wish math classes would focus more on the abstraction aspect and less on calculation.
Not that I disagree about wanting more of the abstraction taught, but absolutely, 100% yes. Accurate, rapid mental math is a core life skill, and the lack of it causes people real problems.
There are many people who are bad/slow at calculation and amazing at math; many of them have math PhDs even. Ya, they might use a calculator in their daily life, but those are cheap anyways.
It would be nice to get an ALU implanted in my brain, it would be much more efficient for calculation than using a neural network.
Mental math skills are for prosaic daily-life problems, and have almost nothing to do with mathematics as a discipline. (Being good at spelling on its own does not make one a good writer.) Not needing a calculator at the grocery store to figure out which of some competing products are cheaper per unit mass, or figure out change + tip at a restaurant is useful knowledge.
Yes, I think it should be considered a virtue. It's a very useful skill that I used daily.
It shouldn't be beaten into kids ("learn your timestables!!" is not an effective teaching method), but if using an abacus or similar helps people calculate faster, it is likely a good thing.
I am not sure, but doesn't it make also sense financially for some parents to send their kids to soroban classes because that's actually cheaper and more frequent in a week than other alternatives when they cannot go anymore to the public after-school services (I speak about gakudo/学童 here)?
My mom was in a high school abacus club back then. When she told me a story that she went to a tournament as a part of the school team, my response was "what the heck is an abacus competition!?" Competitive abacus is already quaint enough to most Japanese people, but I imagine it was a bit like today's e-sports. She said it really trains your mental arithmetic skill, and indeed she's been extremely good at adding up 6 or 7-digit numbers in her 70s. She passed away last year.
I have a soroban and it's amazing how fast one can compute without electronics and I am no expert at it. On top of that, it exposes a certain way of working with numbers that is very helpful for mental computations.
On top of everything you get a nice tactile feeling with it. Will it replace my desk calculator, probably not, but it could.
When I was in grade school, I got a book about how to use the abacus and taught myself. I got really good at it, too. It's too bad I didn't stay in practice, really, maybe I should pick it up again.
If my school had offered this, I would have found it useful.
I use the Trachtenberg speed system of mathematics to do mental math. I can reliably do any 2 digit by 2 digit number and most of the time do 3 by 3 digit numbers. Does anyone know if it’s possible for an adult (I’m 26) to do better with soroban training? The book I had as a kid (translated from japanese) said I would never get good at it after the age of 12.. but that sounds kind of defeatist to me.
I think they just write that so kids feel more compelled to put in an effort. It may be a bit harder as an adult, but by no means impossible (especially if your goal is 3 or 4 digit numbers).
Abacuses are a niche hobby in Japanese schools, in the same fashion that e.g. competitive poetry recital is a niche hobby in American schools, and are factually not taught in the fashion that e.g. poetry is taught in American schools.