Loob, your memory is still good... That's how I remember it as well...My memory is rather hazy: it was, unfortunately, a very long time ago!
My memory is holding up well. Definitely this way of reciting them.
We all remember things well from when we were young and our brain was about empty. But as it fills up you need to push out some things to make room for the new stuff. The old stuff is there for good; so the new stuff pushes other new stuff out. So you end up forgetting things you read just an hour earlier.
)
I learnt my "times" tables too (I somehow missed the 9 times table and have difficulty to this day - perhaps I should attend remedial numeracy classes!).
It was useful for commerce too (and probably still is useful). Even today many items are sold by the dozen or the gross (in the USA). So it was useful to know that six dozen (or a half-gross) was equal to seventy-two; or that a quarter gross (three dozen) equals thirty-six, etc.I learnt my "times" tables too (I somehow missed the 9 times table and have difficulty to this day - perhaps I should attend remedial numeracy classes!).
I wonder if they still teach the "twelve times" table since the currency went decimal a little while ago. The 12 times table always seemed useful in the days of pounds, shillings and pence
Same here, except for the first line, where the numbers were inverted. So it went:
That's how we said it (Midwest, early '60s) but we only learned up to the tens.
7 x 8 was the one I always had trouble with. As often as not I'd end up doing 6 x 8 + 8 or 7 x 7 + 7.
It's common in Indian English.
Yes. Four threes are twelve, five threes are fifteen . . .Just realised, after seeing another thread on the same topic, that my earlier post wasn't fully accurate. All the lines were "inverted", with the number that the table was for coming first.
It depends on how juvenile you are. Once past primary school, the "times" version is likely to be more common, and should use "is", not "are", because the implied subject is "the result of <performing this operation> is ...".
Strange, isn't it, the fashionable dogma in education? I've always found instant recall of multiplication a valuable skill. Very useful when working as a barman - these days bar staff seem incapable of mentally calculating the price of a few drinks. Having learnt the tables by rote as a young child didn't stunt my abilityy to go on to A-level maths at secondary school.
For me, it was definitely
I was taught, "four times three is twelve" or "four times three equals twelve".
To me "four threes" is four groups of three. You can add (3+3+3+3=12) or multiply (4x3=12) to get 12, but they aren't 12 until you add or multiply them. So the phrase "four threes are twelve" is not one I've heard.
Yes, the "new math" of the 1980s and 1990s was terrible. I completely agree that memorizing multiplication tables is valuable. To this day I say to myself "nine times six is 54".
This sounds bizarre. Where I live, "into" is only used for division:
That wouldn’t make sense in New York either. Three into six is the same as six divided by three.
That's Indianism. Indians use "into" to express multiplication/to mean multiplied by! Be careful while dealing with Indians. 99.9% Indian teachers don't know "into" is used to express division in standard English, not multiplication.
