Language-based rumors:
Rumor 1: Because Asians (by which they mean Japanese and Chinese people) have an easier counting system, so that kids get to arithmetic faster (posited by Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers)
That....makes absolutely no sense to me. Japan and China are base-10 just like the rest of the planet. The "numerals" are different, but I can't see anything inherently better or worse about Sino-Japanese numerals versus Arabic numerals.
The one thing that might be different is that (in Chinese, at least) linguistically it iterates ones (
yi), tens (
shi), hundreds (
bai), thousands (
qian), ten-thousands (
wan). Having ten-thousand as a ordinal unit is sort of helpful in doing quick mental arithmetic of numbers in a certain range, but that's about it. Especially given that
wan was often used classically to mean a generic "many", as in the
Daodejing:
Dao give birth to One
One gives birth to Two
Two gives birth to Three
Three gives birth to ten thousand things.It's got to go beyond East Asia, because the stereotype is typically extended to Indians as well. They're also base-10, and while 10,000 is rendered as "ten thousand", the hundred-thousand has its own unit, the
lakh. So one million is rendered as ten lakh, and then ten million (or 1,000 lakh) is one
crore (
koti in several major dialects). I know the crore still has pretty wide usage in modern India, especially in reporting of financial news.