Re:U.S. Team Wins First Place at International Math Olympiad
by umanwizard on Thursday August 04, 2016 @01:15AM
(#12223522)
That's totally false. Plenty of Chinese and Indian researchers are reading math papers and books in English, which requires the same level of English skills.
I learned a foreign language to fluency at age 17, and math is one of the easiest things to read in the second language because the grammar is never very creative and the vocabulary is much more restricted than a novel or even a typical newspaper.
(Tangentially, a lot of people born in raised in India speak English at near-native levels. Especially the well-educated classes that would be likely to move to the US and participate in something like this.)
I learned a foreign language to fluency at age 17, and math is one of the easiest things to read in the second language because the grammar is never very creative and the vocabulary is much more restricted than a novel or even a typical newspaper.
(Tangentially, a lot of people born in raised in India speak English at near-native levels. Especially the well-educated classes that would be likely to move to the US and participate in something like this.)