Ask Lemmy

I had the typical American experience of sitting with my dad every day for a couple weeks crying while he repeats "WHAT'S SEVEN TIMES THREE

I want to say we were supposed to learn them in second grade in Canada, but I personally never did. My memory isn't good enough, so to this day, I just work it out in my head. For small numbers like 1-12, its easy enough to break it down to smaller parts and solve quickly anyway.

I memorized them. 'I didn't feel like it' was not an option. We did times tables every morning, everyone knew them after a while.

We stopped at 10x10. I'm still bad at them!

I never did. I was never interested in memorization, when I already had ways to do multiplication slowly using basic principles.

I still pull out a calculator for nearly every calculation. I can't do 6×7 instantly, if I don't have a calculator I'd take my time and break it down to something that I can solve. And sometimes I get it wrong.

That's never stopped me though. I'm studying electrical engineering and computer science, both of which are very math-heavy, and I get top grades. Most exams allow a calculator anyway.

That's said, I don't recommend this way of life. I think the multiplication table is genuinely really useful to have memorized. I'm a bit of an idiot for never doing that.

Never really memorized it. I just calculated it in my head, unless I had a calculator accessible. It’s slow, but gets the job done.

I got quite fluent in matrix multiplication for a while during my university years. That’s what linear algebra and no calculator exams does to one.

Much easier when I learned you just take the previous number and add + whatever to it.

5 X 8 = 40
5 X 9 = 45 (40+5)
5 X 10 = 50 (45+5)
5 X 11 = 55 (50+5)
5 X 12 = 60 (55+5)

My dad played a kind of patty-cake growing up where I practiced doing times tables in rhythm. My dad would pick the addend and set the pace, and we'd alternate left and right hand high fives while saying say multiples of four. 4 8 12 … 36 40, then we'd just switch to 7's, slightly slower pacing 7 14 20~ … if i made mistakes - 21, let's try again: 7 14 21 2…8 35 … no reprimand for error - we had a beat to keep, just take a downbeat and try again. Of course simpler numbers were taken further 3s were occasionally done out to 300, and 2s were done as fast as I could spit out the words. 5s were often the rest set, done at a basic pace.

The madlad had me polishing my 13×13s before school ever even mentioned the existence of multiplication.

If i remember, the way I was taught was by doing basic single digit multiplication in many different contexts so much that I slowly internalized the math. There were multiplication tables we filled out in class, multiplication videogames, multiplication flash cards, multiplication board games, multiplication storybooks, multiplication puzzles, multiplication games in PE.

And I was primed for learning division in preschool through the concept of sharing. If you have 18 cupcakes and eight friends, how many should your friends and yourself get? If you have a pizza with 12 slices and four friends, how do you share fairly? If you think about it, that's the multiplication table they were teaching me there, just slower and backwards.

Rural US in the 1980s and we learnt it starting at I think like 8-9 years old. At the time 9x9 was all we learnt and we were just expected to memorize our "times tables". I don't recall any song or anything.

7 was weirdly easy for me, 9 has tricks to at least 10 that can help, but the easiest was probably 2, 5, 10. How? Idk. Brute force probably.

we just went to 10x10, and I think we did that in like 2nd grade. so like 8yo. we just had to straight up memorize it, no helpful song or anything. We did it in sections though, so one day we were supposed to memorize 1x1 to 1x10, another day 2x1 to 2x10 etc.

I can remember 11x11 because it is annoyingly 121 not 111, and 12x12 is 144 which I find kinda easy to remember because of gaming monitors using 144hz (I don't get why my brain makes those kinda associations, it just works for me idk). 11x12 is weird because it is the first multiplication where my brain starts picking it apart like 11x12 = (10x12) + (1x12) = 120 + 12 = 132

Only did it to 10x10 in my country :3

It was like.. 2nd or 3rd grade? Anyhow, Im still bad at them, but that's cause my brain does numbers weird lol

I think we had up to do up to 12 times tables by 3rd or 4th grade. I remember starting in 1st at school but really I learned them from Schoolhouse Rock. In the states Schoolhouse Rock was on Saturday Mornings between regular cartoons and they had such great songs.

https://m.youtube.com/channel/UC1yty6F-2neYfwE8xc1A72Q

I just memorized it to be the fastest and get candy, I was a fat kid, and memorizing the single digits is necessary to do math in your head? I never understood how to use my hands and i cant hold a visual that well, like 3 apples become 5 become 1 become a truck in the span of a second

Just a lot of writing them down and memorizing them from 1st to 3rd grade ish.

There is a few tricks like using your fingers for the 9s https://www.wikihow.com/Use-Your-Fingers-to-Do-the-9s-Times-Tables

But other than that, it was basically brute forced lol.

I did it in Cantonese, probably similar to the Mandarin poem.

I think my mom started making me memorize it in the last year of kindergarten (I was 5yo). By the time multiplication becomes the main topic in primary 2 (2nd grade) maths, I didn't really have much problem doing them. It was really useful to have it recited.

In US, in 1st/2nd we did phonetic learning of the times tables 12x12 as well as the states in alphabetical order and the president's in order of inauguration.

still easy to recite today.

American I think by 4th grade we had to know up to 12 x12

For me I memorized all the self multiples then would subtract or add mentally

Ie 5 X 7 =? Well 5X5= 25 And 5X2=10

so 5X7 =35

So half route memorization half transative properties of multiplication

I grew up in Quebec until I was 7, and then moved to Ontario half way through the school year for Grade 2.

In Wakefield we were just starting to learn the times tables. In Ottawa, they were finished with them and were just about done division. I never really got to learn either before learning fractions.

As a result, while i can do quadratic equations and fractions in my head, I often struggle to reason out multiplication or division.

I believe in 2nd grade I memorized tables from 1-12. Practice makes you quicker with things and as I don't multiply random numbers often it will take me a couple seconds to recall the answer

One of the very few teachers I remember (I’m 68) was Fred Ross due to how effectively he taught me the times tables and more. That guy for months on end drilled the times tables into our heads by repetition. There were no calculators or internet then so it was the most effective way and it worked too.

He also posed a question that to this day I have not found the answer. An English only word with the letter q in it but no u after the q. Can only be a regular word not a name or a city.

Grew up in BC, Canada. We were memorizing the table all the way up to 12x12 by grade three. I don't remember there being a specific limit taught before that...only that we got introduced to multiplication in grade 1, and did more in grade 2. But, grade 3 was when we needed to know the whole thing.

Still not memorized. 7,8,9 still involve doing some quick count by number to get the answer (or using the finger trick for 9)

Mid 5th grade for up to 10. I was slow at it because I did not like the rote learning.

Then a few years later I memorized some 50 digits of pi because why not. I don't know why I found that amusing.

I don't remember if it was 2nd or 3rd grade, but I just memorized them. My grandmother bought flash cards and drilled them with me every day until I had memorized them all.

As long as you work with decimal numbers, there is no need to actually go beyond 10x10. Heck, even 9x9 would suffice, as times ten is just adding the zero. Anything else is derived from that.

3rd grade. Was pretty easy. Also helped I had nearly a mile walk to school (and back) with no distractions (didn't think I had even a Walkman yet) so I was able to practice whatever. Math was easiest because it was right or wrong and it was easy to pick 2 random numbers.

I was in grade four so about 10 years old. It was just up to the nines and it was pure memorization. Still remember them today, 50 years later.

I was only taught up to 10×10 in primary school, and learned mostly by rote (and also, "skip counting"). I've also heard of some techniques like matching fingers to do one-digit multiplication, but I never really learned how to do that. By that point, I've mostly memorized the multiplication table up to 10.

For 11, it's absurdly easy once I got the technique, just double the number (up until 9). 11×10 is just appending a zero, and 11×11 I just memorized.

For 12, I actually didn't bother that much? 12×N = 10×N + 2×N. Thus, 12×11 = 110 + 24 = 134 and 12×12 = 120 + 24 = 144 (which I got memorized for some reason).

I still have some trouble with the 6, 7, and sometimes 8 multiplication tables, but I can usually recall it with a bit of effort. Not much, but not without some awkward pause.

Now, for how I got to memorize it. The process was hard at first. I had to recite the multiplication tables as a drill almost everyday. We also had long quizzes (hundred items) of one-digit multiplication and two-digit division (by the fourth grade), so there's an incentive to memorize the tables if only to be able to get through those quizzes with minimal pain. There's also a social stigma for being the last person to get done with those quizzes (or worse, running out of time), so there's that pressure too.