![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fandomonymousSo sometimes I hear from people with small children about this phase in development, where numbers are understood as an array: "one, two, three, four, five, six..." They need to go through the whole array to count at all, and if distracted mid-array they get all tripped up and upset.
I'm an adult with probably an above-average number sense...in English. I'm pretty damn proud of my ability to make sense of numbers without necessarily dropping into the array. I can pretty quickly grok "hey that's five buttons" without counting up in my head.[0]
I gained my skills in English very late in toddler-hood but have them quite fluently now. (This is one reason I'm self-diagnosed as autistic-ish.) I've dabbled in a bunch of languages throughout my life but haven't gotten good at any of them. In the last two months I've taken on a fairly serious study of Tagalog. Between language study apps and bits of my childhood I've got roughly three hundred words/phrases I can recognize - so somewhat similar to an early toddler. Obviously, this includes basics of counting.[1]
I'm trying to occasionally translate my inner dialogue into Tagalog as practice. So my English brain says "Here are five buttons"; my Tagalog brain then goes "eto ang...isa-dalawa-tatlo-apat-lima ng buton".
That is to say, while my English language brain has number sense beyond array mode, my Tagalog brain is stuck in array mode. (It's better than it used to be, where my brain said 'wait, not in English' and immediately tried to count in Mandarin.) And I get it, my brain is literally searching for a thing generally given as, well, an array.
Can I as an adult get past array mode in my second language, and if so how? In related questioning, how do we train children to move past array mode in their acquisition of language and number sense in general? Is is different for multilingual children?
Are there *specific* ways I can practice to decouple the idea of numbers from the array?
Thanks in advance for contemplating this. <3
[0] In fact, I've also got a trick of internally pairing single digits both as complements of ten and complements of nine, in order to easily round tips up to the nearest dollar. (So if the bill ends in .82, my brain goes "two and eight is ten, eight and one is nine" and fills in .18. Then of course there's a separate calculation of how many dollars I'll leave behind as tip, but that's beyond the scope of this question.)
[1] For this conversation, regarding counting objects, let's only consider the 'native' Tagalog counting system: "isa, dalawa, tatlo, apat, lima, anim..." I understand that the Spanish-derived version ("uno, dos, tres, kwatro, singko, sais...") also exists and is, as far as I can tell, only used for clock time nowadays. I also understand that you can, in fact, just use English numbers because Taglish is A Thing. And maybe the answer is to just Taglish it up, but god that feels LAZY, and also not useful for understanding *others* who may or may not Taglish.
I'm an adult with probably an above-average number sense...in English. I'm pretty damn proud of my ability to make sense of numbers without necessarily dropping into the array. I can pretty quickly grok "hey that's five buttons" without counting up in my head.[0]
I gained my skills in English very late in toddler-hood but have them quite fluently now. (This is one reason I'm self-diagnosed as autistic-ish.) I've dabbled in a bunch of languages throughout my life but haven't gotten good at any of them. In the last two months I've taken on a fairly serious study of Tagalog. Between language study apps and bits of my childhood I've got roughly three hundred words/phrases I can recognize - so somewhat similar to an early toddler. Obviously, this includes basics of counting.[1]
I'm trying to occasionally translate my inner dialogue into Tagalog as practice. So my English brain says "Here are five buttons"; my Tagalog brain then goes "eto ang...isa-dalawa-tatlo-apat-lima ng buton".
That is to say, while my English language brain has number sense beyond array mode, my Tagalog brain is stuck in array mode. (It's better than it used to be, where my brain said 'wait, not in English' and immediately tried to count in Mandarin.) And I get it, my brain is literally searching for a thing generally given as, well, an array.
Can I as an adult get past array mode in my second language, and if so how? In related questioning, how do we train children to move past array mode in their acquisition of language and number sense in general? Is is different for multilingual children?
Are there *specific* ways I can practice to decouple the idea of numbers from the array?
Thanks in advance for contemplating this. <3
[0] In fact, I've also got a trick of internally pairing single digits both as complements of ten and complements of nine, in order to easily round tips up to the nearest dollar. (So if the bill ends in .82, my brain goes "two and eight is ten, eight and one is nine" and fills in .18. Then of course there's a separate calculation of how many dollars I'll leave behind as tip, but that's beyond the scope of this question.)
[1] For this conversation, regarding counting objects, let's only consider the 'native' Tagalog counting system: "isa, dalawa, tatlo, apat, lima, anim..." I understand that the Spanish-derived version ("uno, dos, tres, kwatro, singko, sais...") also exists and is, as far as I can tell, only used for clock time nowadays. I also understand that you can, in fact, just use English numbers because Taglish is A Thing. And maybe the answer is to just Taglish it up, but god that feels LAZY, and also not useful for understanding *others* who may or may not Taglish.