Counting

For the past 54 years, I have never count from 1 to 6000. Last Saturday, I tried to count the number of steps from my place to Jungle Fall Hut on Bukit Timah.

It was almost impossible for me to count as I was so used to count from one to ten and recount from one to ten, if I was not paying attention, I would count from one after ten. So I decided to use my fingers to keep track of the number of tens. However, even using fingers to keep track of number of tens would have problem once it was over thousand of steps. So I failed to count the total number of steps. Another issue of counting is the when the count is more than hundred, counting using either English or Chinese would have three syllabus and it would be difficult to keep pace with the steps. Thinking of this, if we were to use Bahasa Malaysia to count, we would have to slow down or we would not be able to keep pace with the steps as each count is two syllabus instead of one. This is a typical case of limitation of language posing problem for counting. If Malaysia were to use Malay instead of English to teach Mathematics, Malay students would suffer the consequences but not the Chinese students, as the Chinese students would be counting in Chinese or English mentally and translate to Malay when writing in Malay. But the Malay students would not be using English to count mentally, definitely they would lose out.

On Sunday, after thinking about ways to solve the problem encountered, I decided to count from one to hundred and using my fingers to keep track of the number of hundreds. Also at each hundred steps counted, I would put an imaginary tag of the number on the place so that I had better memory of the number as my mind wondered away or greeted someone on the way, I would have lost count and could not remember the count.

However, from my place to Jungle Fall Hut, the count was 5668 and 6165 return. Today, the count was 5960 and 6645 respectively today. There might be missed counts and also the path condition after raining required smaller steps.

Interestingly, a jogger I met today told me German students also having problem counting due to their language. He said they count 47 by 7 then 40 instead of four seven.