Now that Lily is in kindergarten, Serena has also been learning quite a bit of Chinese. One of the more interesting things is that she counts better in Chinese than in English. In English, she can count to thirteen, but she gets mixed up with fourteen and sixteen – they usually get omitted. But in Chinese, she can count all the way to 29 on her own – it is the regular structure of Chinese counting (which incidentally, Malcolm Gladwell mentioned in Outliers – see here for an excerpt: http://www.gladwell.com/outliers/outliers_excerpt3.html)
Pretty neat that Serena demonstrates the concept.
I’m also pretty excited that Lily is actually correlating the Chinese and English numbering systems. When we count at night, our counting sometimes goes like this (we take turns saying the numbers in the sequence):
yi, er, three, four, wu, liu, seven, eight, jiu, shr. Lily can do this with ones and tens, and maybe with hundred and thousands…
It was neat that Lily initiated this. Our counting now in the car, when we have a lot of time, is by ones to ten, by tens to a hundred, by hundreds to a thousand, by thousands to ten thousand, by ten thousands to a hundred thousand, by hundred thousands to a million, and so on to a billion. She knows her Chinese units to yi wan (ten thousand), which is a special unit that doesn’t exist in English – once she counts larger than yi wan, the number systems don’t correlate as well, so that will be interesting conceptually for her.
It is also interesting to try to teach conceptually what these numbers mean. I’ve tried sharing:
* Your kindergarten class is around 30 people
* Your school is around 500 people
* Our church is around 3000 people
* San Francisco is around 1 million people (not even sure if this is right)
* The population of the United States is around 400 million people
* The population of the world is about 7 billion people
But population isn’t very helpful, since I don’t think she can visualize that many people. I need other reasonably accurate representations of large numbers – blades of grass in a field? Grains of rice in a rice bag? Any other suggestions?
