I remember reading this question from sample Microsoft interview questions :P
833 karma · joined November 14, 2008
Even if it is hard to count numbers in english, it is still easy to see the pattern in numerical symbols. Either way it is certainly not a momentous task for a 4 year old to form relations words to numerical symbols, with their abundance of ability in memory. This is why Gladwell's theory falls apart - a much more likely theory is that math ability is more readily determined by HARD work or innate genius.
And concerning his rice farming theory, I wouldn't know whether to laugh or take it as an insult, because to me it is that ridiculous. His claiming effectively, that farmers in China work the hardest, because they farmed rice. On how many levels does this seem inconsistent?
The third case is again different to the second case because in the second case you have to pull the trigger, where as in the third case the trigger is essentially already pulled and so the responsibility is just to direct the bullet - this puts you in 'damage control' mode.
Typing fast and efficiently has many benefits - you save energy, you do things faster. Although in the case of programming typing speed is only one factor which determine how well you program. One could argue that learning more powerful languages or the ability to problem solve are equally if not more important.
The main drawback with these is that you have to use CUDA, which certainly takes a while before you wrap your mind across. I played CUDA for a while but considered it is too much effort for something which is very specialised and might not become mainstream. Still there seems to be many people using CUDA and with lots of research roles - see the CUDA forums.
Indeed as you say the Chinese language is hard at the start and gets easier. In my case when I moved to Australia I forgot a lot of my Chinese even after 1 year of not reading. 4 years later I could barely read, over the holidays I was forced to study Chinese, I did nothing but read a novel, some 10 pages a day which initially made next to no sense and took almost the whole day. But after two weeks of continuous reading, I could understand a lot more, and was reading much much faster(managed to finish a 400 page book). The trick to learning to read Chinese is to get going and not stop, and skip most of what you can't understand, and gradually you will pick it up.
I would also add that if you're not seriously committed to learning Chinese, why bother? Your progress would be so painstakingly slow it would seem you're forgetting as much as you learn - I'm trying to say don't do what Moser is claiming, tackle Chinese with less than 100% with slow progress and find out it is hard after 5 years.
It is also my view that much of the difficulty is a inherently negative mental illusion that the language is hard, and that also hinders learning. If people learned Chinese as if it were playing their favorite game, instead of something inherently dry and boring (which is another argument) this will speed up the learning process.
I say this because when I moved to Australia (I'm Chinese) I was speaking English in 3 month, given I was 9 yrs old - but it just shows how much more important your environment is compared to how much time you study a language (unless its a very close language).