> "Surprisingly enough, it's proven that Chinese-speaking children are better at counting numbers than English-speaking counterparts because of their language. Bilingual children are better at counting when they think in Chinese than in English. The irregularity of the English number system makes it harder for children to count numbers properly."
Not sure I'd give much credence to that hypothesis, though. Hard to disentangle the many factors influencing the results. Having said that, the Chinese numbers are pleasantly short and logical, by and large.
English has the advantage again in big numbers, where we have million, billion, trillion, quadrillion, etc., with the Latin prefix N indicating 10^6N (long scale, old British usage and continental Europe) or 10^(3+3N) (short scale, American usage).
Presumably you were not a kid anymore at that time. The OP was mentioning about how easy is for kids to acquire/improve their maths skills if counting is made easier by the language itself. That probably doesn't correlate that well with those kids' academic performances 15 or 20 years later, but that was not the point.
I wonder if a French people make change with 20 Euro-cent coins more often than others do.
Would be interesting to see relative difficulty of each language, some of them are pretty close and have very similar difficulty while others are close but widely different difficulty.