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The tonal pitches in the Chinese language really help with mathematics. In Chinese, numbers are much easier to remember because the language has an extra layer

The tonal pitches in the Chinese language really help with mathematics. In Chinese, numbers are much easier to remember because the language has an extra layer of communication - Read: Which numbers correspond to which Chinese tones?. This is a completely foreign concept in most western languages and it works like this: each word's meaning can change based on what intonation one uses for it. There are 5 different tones. So the word ba, for example, can have 5 different meanings depending on which intonation one uses. (to read more you can read here http://www.wku.edu/~shizhen.gao/.. http://www.wku.edu/~shizhen.gao/... ) Each number has a certain intonation as well. So when Chinese people want to remember a string of numbers, they can just remember the "tune" of that string of numbers. This sounds (pun intended) fascinating. Can any Chinese speaker here expound on this concept?

digilypse 10y ago
The citation refers to the existence of tones. The rest of the quoted text is from the author's observations as a language student. Tones don't provide an extra layer of communication, they're part of the natural pronunciation. Fluent speakers think about tones about as much as English speakers think about long/short vowels. Even with that aside, the author's idea that tones can be a natural mnemonic device of sorts has some logical problems. Yes, one might use tones as an additional memory anchor, but you'd still need to memorize the actual number along with the "tune", and you could do the same in English: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ab8GtuPdrUQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ab8GtuPdrUQ Given the number 5316742918 (typical length of a phone number), you'd need to consciously go back and digit-by-digit take note of the tones. If you convert and hum the "tune", it'd go something like this: u--\--\\u-- or, numerically, 31141144311.* This requires conscious effort to convert and memorize already, but now we have no way to convert back to the original value as the tune could refer to any of 442,368 different numbers. *Tones map to digits as follows: 1: 1, 3, 7, 8 3: 5, 9 4: 2, 4, 6

digilypse 10y ago

The citation refers to the existence of tones. The rest of the quoted text is from the author's observations as a language student. Tones don't provide an extra layer of communication, they're part of the natural pronunciation. Fluent speakers think about tones about as much as English speakers think about long/short vowels. Even with that aside, the author's idea that tones can be a natural mnemonic device of sorts has some logical problems. Yes, one might use tones as an additional memory anchor, but you'd still need to memorize the actual number along with the "tune", and you could do the same in English: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ab8GtuPdrUQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ab8GtuPdrUQ Given the number 5316742918 (typical length of a phone number), you'd need to consciously go back and digit-by-digit take note of the tones. If you convert and hum the "tune", it'd go something like this: u--\--\\u-- or, numerically, 31141144311.* This requires conscious effort to convert and memorize already, but now we have no way to convert back to the original value as the tune could refer to any of 442,368 different numbers. *Tones map to digits as follows: 1: 1, 3, 7, 8 3: 5, 9 4: 2, 4, 6