Koreans owe their language "Hangul" for boasting their world-class math problems solving skills, American newspaper Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday.



A logic behind such statement lies with numbers of linguistic letters required to write numeric values. In comparison with English, Hangul takes far less letters to write the values. For example, it requires only two to write 11 (십일), while English takes six (eleven). The same perk applies to Chinese, which has nine distinctive words to indicate the values while English as 24.



The paper said such disparity in linguistic brevity is directly related to the levels of convenience in learning math by students. An analysis showed that kids in kindergartens and elementary schools in English-speaking nations like the U.S. and Canada generally fall one to two years behind those in Korea and other Asian countries in mastering the same difficulty level of math. The paper also introduced an experiment result that Turkish kids aged three to four understood the concept of numeric values faster than Canadian kids, including that of decimal system.



