Suppose a child is baking with his grandmother’s pancakes using her old recipe book. He reads them out loud, slowly, line by line. And suddenly he stops.
«Seven glasses of sugar?»
The grandmother laughs. It says one cup there.
It's just a unit for grandma with a long nose, as they taught in her school. But the child is used to another unit, the straight stick from the American class. The only number he knows with a curly stroke on top is seven.
«Then where are the seven of you?»
The grandmother flips through the notebook and finds a recipe that has seven. She points to it with her finger.
«Here are seven. Do you see the dot?»
The child read it in his own way
First, I want to fix things. But look what he did.
He saw a sign with an inclined line at the top and a vertical one at the bottom. In his school, that's what a seven looks like, and nothing more. So he read the rules.
According to his rules, there were seven. According to Grandma's, there was one. The number is one, and the ways of writing it are different; they met on the same page.
Where does a single unit have a nostril?
Take a sheet of paper and write the unit the way you were taught in school, without thinking.
If you studied in Russia or the Soviet Union, the hand might start with a short stroke from the bottom up and only then move down. That is the nose.
In some people it is small and barely noticeable. In others it is long, almost like the top beam. And the longer it is, the more like a seven-foot unit it looks.
That's why they put a dot across the legs in the seven. It's like telling the reader that there are seven in front of him, not a single one with a bulky nose.
In Grandma's notebook, this pair works flawlessly. A unit with a nose, a seven with a dot—it's hard to confuse them.
And in the American school
There, the unit is more often written with a straight stick. Without a mouthpiece, sometimes with a small base at the bottom.
It is almost impossible to confuse such a unit with a seven. Therefore, there is no need for a dash in a seven, and many teachers simply do not put it there.
Each system is logical in its own way. Trouble begins when one hand follows the same rules as the others, while the other eyes read them differently.
A child who grows up with two languages encounters this constantly. At school, there are only certain numbers; in grandma's letters and postcards, there are others. And no one warned that adults have different habits altogether.
Two units and two sevens
As Grandma writes
That's what many people who studied in Russia and the Soviet Union write.
As written in the American school
The unit is more often written with a straight arrow.
Where does the confusion hide?
If the nose is long, the grandmother's digit resembles the seven that the child is used to seeing in class. The dot on the grandmother's seven helps the child distinguish these numbers.
Illustration. Everyone has their own handwriting, but noses and dots come in different lengths, and the number of them does not change.
What to show a child
Place two pages next to each other: Babaushkin's recipe and the school notebook.
Ask where the unit is.
«Here, it's Grandma with a nose. And I have a stick.».
Ask where the seven are.
«My grandmother has a line. I don't have one.».
Now the child has a key. If you see a dot, it means seven. If you see a dotless nose, it means that grandma has a one.
I could ask him to write down his grandmother's recipe for me on a card. Let him decide how to write the numbers himself. The main thing is that it's easy for him and his grandmother to read later.
The grandmother's notebook was most likely also written by hand in cursive. There are also surprises in the letters there, and that's what our article is about. about the Russian cursive.
The number does not change as a result.
The tip of one digit is a dot, the tip of seven is a dot, and the open-top four is a detail that remains as a part of the handwriting.
How many cups of sugar? It doesn't matter. If grandma writes 17 and the child writes 17 in their own way, the number will be the same. The number only changes the place of the digit; 17 and 71 are composed of the same symbols.
How a child calls numbers out loud is a separate story. We’ll discuss it in the article. Why does a child say eight instead of eight?.
If the dot gets into the school notebook
Sometimes, after grandma's recipes, the child starts to cross out the seven themselves. He likes it that way, that's how grandma does it.
In the classroom, this might surprise the teacher. It’s easy to mistake a squiggle across a number for an error correction.
Then the child will benefit from one phrase in English.
«It’s a seven. I write it with a line so it doesn’t look like a one.
If the teacher finds such a mark uncomfortable, they can agree that the child should write it without a dash at school. At home, they should write it as they wish.
And the pies?
One cup of sugar was added. The pancakes turned out good.
Next time the child may read the grandmother's unit by themselves. And if they still have doubts, the answer is in the same notebook, on the page with the dot.
Frequently asked questions about the seven with a dot
Why do they write seven in Russia with a dash?
The dot helps distinguish the seven from the one. For many who learned to write in Russia, the one starts with a nose, a short stroke from bottom to top. If the nose is long, this unit becomes similar to a seven.
Why does a child read the grandmother's unit as a seven?
In an American school, the unit is more often written with a straight pencil. The child knows how to count seven with the sign with the sloping line at the top, so the unit with a long nose may seem to him to be seven.
What is the English name for a seven with a dot?
It’s called crossed seven or a seven with a line. The child can explain it to the teacher like this: It’s a seven. I write it with a line so it doesn’t look like a one.
Does the dot change the number?
No. The point is on one of them, the dot on the seventh one and the open square on the fourth one are all part of the same style. The number only changes the position of the digit; 17 and 71 are written with the same symbols, but the numbers are different.
Is it necessary to write a seven with a dot in an American school?
Not necessarily. Not one of the forms is necessarily the correct one. If the teacher is unfamiliar with such a notation, you can agree that at school the child writes it without the dot, but at home as they are used to doing.
How to help a child learn to read numbers written in Russian handwriting?
Place Grandma's page and her school notebook next to each other and together find the units and the seven. You see the dot, that's seven. You see the nose without the dot, that's Grandma's unit.
How a child calls numbers out loud is explained in an article Why does a child say eight instead of eight?, And how to read handwritten letters, in the material about the Russian cursive.
