![]() With the abacus, on the other hand, you start with the leftmost digit of a number, the highest value column, as seen in the clip above, and gradually work your way to the units. When you add and multiply using a pen and paper, you always start with the units and then work backwards to the tens, hundreds and so on. When you learn with an abacus, she added, you have a concrete representation of numbers, which makes them easier to understand.įrom looking at the children doing their sums, I saw that the abacus also makes intuitive sense. Mina, who lives and teaches in California, said that American children find numbers harder to grasp than Japanese children because they see them as purely abstract, and this leads to many children hating mathematics. (I went to the All-Japan National Soroban Championship, which will be the subject of a future post.)įor some teachers, like Mina Watanabe, the abacus is important in fostering a love of numbers. When you reach certain levels you are awarded dans, just like in the martial arts, and there are many local, regional and national competitions. Abacus calculation is treated like a sport. Urawa Soroban Academy boss Chie Takayanagi says that whereas in the past soroban training had practical use, it remains popular because it brings other benefits that are still relevant, such as concentration and memorisation skills.Īnd it is also fun. My first question was why? What is the point of learning how to calculate fast using an abacus, since we never need to use one in the real world? I have never felt held back by my inability to perform speedy additions of absurdly large numbers. There I saw children as young as five perform stunningly fast calculations. My first stop was the Urawa Soroban Academy in Tokyo, one of Japan's 20,000 or so after-school abacus clubs.
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