Children from East Asian countries have been generally shown to perform better at
mathematics tests than children from Western countries. Many explanations have
been proposed, including parental emphasis, pedagogical techniques and cultural
differences. One suggested explanation is the different way numerals are constructed
in the languages of the two areas.
In general, numerals in Chinese, Japanese and Korean are more systematically
transparent than numerals in English and other European languages. This is especially
true of numbers between 11 and 99, as shown in the following table, where East
Asian numerals are directly translated into English for ease of comparison, and
Japanese pronunciations are given as one East Asian example: