Soroban is an abacus that developed in Japan
It is derived from the ancient Chinese suanpan, imported to Japan in the 14th century. Also, like the suanpan, it is still in use today, despite the proliferation of practical and affordable pocket electronic calculators.
Become adept at mental calculation
In Japan, Soroban is taught in some primary schools as part of lessons in mathematics. The reason is because it can demonstrated decimal number system visually. Moreover, someone can take license on it. Those who proficient in use of soroban almost automatically become adept at mental calculation. In Japanese, that kind of person is called anzan (blind calculator).
Simple Soroban by BtcoSoroban
Simple Soroban is a digital Soroban application. It has clean, efficient, and fast interface. In this app, you can move multiple beads at once. Furtherore, you can customize your user interface. You can use it for free. Moreover, it doesn’t have in-app purchases or ads like other free apps. Besides, it doesn’t require special permission to install.
Free mode and challenge mode
It has two modes only. This app has free mode that you can use to calculate addition, substraction, multiplication or division. Also, you could learn soroban by yourself in its challenge mode. It is like playing game in this mode.
Furthermore, you can practice the basic concept of addition, substraction, multiplication and division with this app. It motivated you to be faster at solving arithmetic. Thus, it improve your mental calculation.
You can see your progress in the Rangking
For your information, the app collects user statistic. You can see your progress in the Rangking. It shows your rangking based on how fast you are compared with other users.
In addition, you will find the tutorial on the challenge mode. Hence, you can get the basic concept to use it. There are 4 operations(addition, subtraction, multiplication and division) and 3 difficulty levels(easy, medium, hard). In this mode, your goal is to solve the equation as fast as possible.
How to read soroban
Each abacus rod represents one digit in a decimal number.
Furthermore, the bottom beads are called earth beads or unit beads. Each of the bead has a value of one (1).
In addition, the top beads are called heaven beads. However, each bead has a value of five (5). To represent a number, move beads to the center beam.
Examples on the basic of addition:
1+2=
3+3=
4+4=
9+6=
Examples on the basic of substraction:
456-251=
466-259
The secret to use it efficiently is to be able to decompose numbers. Also, practice decomposing into forms with 5 and 10 to solve faster. Those numbers are the most useful ones.
Decomposing decimal numbers:
You might find that it is so difficult even for simple arithmetic like 7+9. However, don’t give up. You will be glad that once you master it, you will easily do big digit arithmetic.