No, but they have a small advantage that can be turned into a big advantage: their language.

In Malcolm? In his book, The Outsider, The Story of Success, Malcolm Gladwell discusses how a small advantage at the beginning brings a huge advantage. Children born after the hockey deadline will be older than many peers, so they will be older than them. In the end, this small advantage means that he joined the team more and more times and was elected to higher and higher leagues and teams until you were finally born with most Canadian hockey players in the first few months of the year.

A small advantage at the beginning can be compounded until it becomes a destructive advantage.

When it comes to mathematics, China's logic is absurd. I'm comparing the other extreme, France. The word for 97 is "4-2 17". For China, 1997 is 97,9,10,7-9,7. 583 is five, one hundred, eight, ten, three. Five hundred dollars, eight tens and three more. And so on (until it reaches 654.38+ million, the situation becomes a little more complicated)

You only need to know 13 words to count to 99999! Besides, it is difficult for people to learn Chinese.

It's suddenly much easier to understand how these numbers work-it's a matter of language. Chinese provides an explanation.

This is even more obvious on the issue of scores. 5/ 17? 8/ 12? How many children cried because they didn't know the score?

At the same time, in China, 8/ 12, item 8/ 12-from 12, 8. Similarly, language itself makes it easier to understand complex mathematical concepts.

I'm not saying that all China people are good at math. But what I want to say is that maybe it is the logic of their language that makes them take a small step at the beginning.

This can be combined with incredible results.

Editor: Well, after 50 million comments: "But I'm from China and I'm not good at math" or "But (insert nationality) is good at math", let me try to clarify this post.

This does not mean that everyone in China will automatically become good at math. Still the best in math. All it does is provide a small helping factor at the beginning. As far as the average population size is concerned, I think this will translate into a slight increase in the average level. Again, extreme cases are not discussed here.

Obviously, this is just one of many factors at work. In fact, Southeast Asian immigrants tend to adopt successful cultural norms and pass them on to their children (such as pianos and violins), which certainly plays a role. Cultural choice also plays a role-the French are good at basic mathematics because mathematics is considered to be the most important choice in school. Compared with Anglo-Saxons, we pay more attention to basic research, but we can't apply it immediately. The average level of the math group is not necessarily higher, but it has a very high variance.

Finally, the number of words is spoken, not written. In English, we have eleven, twelve, thirteen, ..., nineteen, twenty, thirty, ... ninety kinds, which is an extra degree of complexity and totally not intuitive (compared with Chinese).

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