Training

In this page, you can exercise yourself to learn the basics of the soroban.

This is best done after having read the basics page.

Choose the exercise in the drop-down menu
Click on the "Next button" to display the instructions of the exercise
Click on the soroban beads to compute the operation asked for
Click on the "Check" button, to check your answer

Exercises

Choose an exercise, below

Include previous exercises

Instruction

None

The virtual soroban can not be shown because you need javascript to be turned on !

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Goal of the exercise

Explanation for the current exercise

Warning

The goal is to learn which beads to move in order to perform operations—almost automatically, with as little conscious thought as possible.

This is absolutely not about doing mental calculations and then placing the result on the soroban. That is not the right approach, because you won’t be able to do this efficiently with numbers of 2 or more digits on the soroban.

Instead, the idea is to look at the beads on the soroban and know, which beads to move to add or subtract a number. And do it more and more instinctively.