I need tips on how best to hold a clear mental picture of abacus in my mind while manipulating it. Does anyone have a technique for this?
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This seeem to be mostly about volume of practice and number of sleeps. It also seems to be highly correlated to having a young brain.
I have been off and on, mostly off with my soroban, over the last few years.
Now that I am learning to just treat it as a calculator rather than thinking about the numbers I seem to be getting some traction. I got stuck thinking about the numbers early and never really got comfortable or fast. When I just concentrate on moving the beads and read the numbers at the end it is much more efficient. Concentrate on your hands and the shapes and you may get better traction. … or you may not. Just where my head is currently at with this.
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Practice makes perfect, age doesn’t really matter. You’ll improve with time, but it’s a step-by-step process. First, you need to be fast with a physical abacus (it can also be digital). Once you can solve arithmetic problems like addition, subtraction, and multiplication, then you can move on to doing it without looking, but with small amounts. There are apps to train this skill called Anzan. When using a mental abacus, use a practice system that allows you to improve, like 20 minutes of practice followed by 10 minutes of rest, so your brain adapts faster. Avoid overtraining in the initial stages. Later, you can overtrain to gain more speed, but rest is important in the early stages.
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What helped me was starting with a very simple and stable image of the abacus instead of trying to visualize every bead perfectly. After enough repetition, the movement starts to feel more automatic and less like forced imagination.
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