CountingĪfter 5 beads are counted in the lower deck, the result is "carried" to the upper deck after both beads in the upper deck are counted, the result (10) is then carried to the left-most adjacent column.
#BUY CHINESE ABACUS UPGRADE#
Students can always upgrade their abacus as they advance their math training.PREPARING THE ABACUS: The abacus is prepared for use ("zeroed") by placing it flat on a table and pushing all the beads on both the upper and lower decks away from the beam by sliding the thumb along the beam.īEAD VALUES: Each bead in the upper deck has a value of 5 each bead in the lower deck has a value of 1.īeads are considered counted, when moved towards the Beam- the piece of the abacus frame that separates the two decks. For a beginning student, we recommend a low cost 15 or 17 rod plastic abacus. The better quality sorobans will provide smooth moving beads and touch ergonomics that help build physical speed. Much more expensive handmade wooden Sorobans will cost in the $50 to $200 range. We recommend purchasing an inexpensive starter plastic Soroban which can be purchased at or several other online retailers such as Amazon or Ebay. For a beginning student a 15 or 17 rod Soroban is an ideal choice between size and ease of use.
#BUY CHINESE ABACUS PROFESSIONAL#
You will find professional Sorobans with 21, 23, 27 or even 31 rods but these larger Sorobans can be purchased later on when the student is working with very large numbers. A 17 rod Soroban can count up to 100 quadrillion! Any Soroban of this size will be more than adequate for a beginning Soroban student. Typical starting Sorobans will have 13, 15, or 17 rods. So the more rods on a Soroban the larger the numbers it can handle. Sorobans come in varying sizes with different numbers of vertical rods where each rod represents a digit, 0 through 9, of a base10 number. The Soroban is ideal for teaching mathematics because the Soroban is built on the same base10 number system, i.e.
Again we recommend you purchase the Japanese configuration of the abacus. You will notice there is 1 bead at the top separated from the 4 lower beads at the bottom by a horizontal bar called the reckoning bar. The most important feature to notice about the Japanese Soroban is the number of beads on each vertical rod, 5 beads. Since the Japanese Soroban is simpler and uses our standard base 10 numbering system we highly recommend using the Japanese Soroban as your working abacus. We will discuss base systems in more detail in another post. The reason for the difference in the number of beads is the Soroban uses a “base 10” numbering system while the Suanpan uses a “base 16” numbering system. The Japanese Soroban has 5 beads per rod while the Chinese Suanpan has 7 beads per rod. The difference between the types of abaci are the number the beads per rod. We recommend and throughout the online math program we will only use the Japanese version of the abacus called a Soroban or counting tray. It is possible to use other forms of the abacus such as the Chinese Suanpan by using only 1 bead on top and 4 beads on the bottom. Therefore we expect most of our students will utilize both physical and digital versions of the abacus.īefore we obtain our first abacus we must know what type of abacus to purchase. We recognize the convenience of using a digital abacus.
There are many PC, tablet, and smartphone abacus applications available, many for free. Although we are strongly recommending the use of a physical abacus by no means are we saying don’t use digital versions. This visualization technique will be instrumental in all mental calculations. The sense of touch or feel is important to help speed the student’s mental visualization of the abacus. The reason for suggesting the use of a physical abacus is the user’s sense of touch will be much stronger on a physical abacus than using a digital one like on a tablet or smartphone.
We highly recommend in the beginning of a student’s abacus training that they use a “physical” abacus and not a “digital” abacus. To get started with the online math program, we need an abacus or preferably a Japanese Soroban which can be purchased at anytime on.
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