Making my students laugh was as easy as counting to ten. On my fingers.
They used their fingers too – one hand only. Like our system, one was on the thumb, then two through five added a finger each, index to pinkie. After that, six through ten continued on the same hand, each resembling a letter from American sign language.
The Chinese signed numbers too rapidly for me to follow, especially the last five signs. “Slow down!” I’d plead with my students. “Do six again. Okay, and what was seven?” They’d sigh, show me again, and wonder how I could be so dense about something any four-year-old could rattle off.
“How do you do it in America?” they asked.
I held up my left hand and began counting: “One, two, three, four, five.” When I lifted my right and continued, “Six,” the entire room erupted in laughter.
“What’s so funny?”
“You need two hands to count to ten?”
“Sure.”
“But what if you are holding something in the other hand?”
“I guess you set it down,” I replied sheepishly. Our method was admittedly inefficient.
February 13, 2008 at 9:48 am
It’s amazing how little things like counting are done so differently throughout the world. In the former Yugoslavia, 1 is counted with the thumb, then 2-5 with the rest of the fingers in order. Except, that during and after the war, Muslims would start counting with their thumb, then add the index finger, then with 3 switch to their index, middle and ring fingers - this was because the thumb, index and middle fingers was (still is) a Serbian nationalist salute so they didn’t even want to count that way.
February 13, 2008 at 1:51 pm
I count to 10 (or at least nine) with one hand. Six is pinky only, seven is pinky & ring, etc. Ten is ambiguously all 5 or a closed fist, and I’ll keep right on going, so I remember in my head (or on my other hand) the tens digit, and use only one hand to track the ones’ digit. I don’t know anybody else who does this though — this is my own system.
Also, this is exceedingly geeky, but I have played around with (and know at least one guy that does this well) counting in binary. Each finger is a binary digit — up is one, down is 0. 10 fingers, 10 digits (or should I just say “10 digits”!), so you can count from 0 to 1023 on two hands. And you don’t need a second hand until 32.