15 is “ten-five”, and 57 is “five-ten-seven”.
There are distinct numbers from 1 to 10, and from then on, you make the number the exact same way, using the exact same words (e.g. English makes things a little harder by adjusting the factor of ten from the original number, and having slightly irregular words (one/eleven/ten, two/twelve/twenty, three/thirteen/thirty, etc.).Ĭhinese, in comparison, is entirely regular. The relative complexity of English is not so much down to the actual formation of the numbers – like most Asian languages it uses a strictly base-10 system (numbers are in groups of 10). It should be noted that Takaguchi’s sorting criteria is fairly unscientific -a lot of it is his own opinion from primarily studying the numbers through 1 and 100 in each language. Japanese and Cantonese were 66th and 67th respectively, showing that perhaps due to the simplicity of their counting systems and how numbers are formed, Asian children may have a slight advantage over English children when it comes to picking up early mathematical concepts. In fact, Mandarin was rated 65th out of the 69 languages polled in terms of complexity, whereas English was placed 41st.
As it turns out, the Chinese counting system is far more regular than that of English.
