RPN maps to basic mathematic expressions nicely

It seems that basic mathematics, when expressed in English, maps most
directly to postfix/reverse polish notation, as used in Factor/Forth.

If you are given 2 apples 3 times, how many do you have?

F> 2 3 *
6

Note how the Forth expression maps almost perfectly to English.

Now, for addition, the most common English is not the perfect mapping:

If you have 2 apples and you have <verb>given</verb> 3 more, how many
do you have?

wow, I just noticed something. "times" in the first example is not a
verb. So the forth operator does not necessarily correspond to an
English verb.

So, if you use "more" as your clue to throw in an operator, then Forth
again maps well:

F> 2 3 +
5


Division and subtraction dont seem to map so well:

If you break 12 in to 4 groups... ah! neat... there we go, "groups"
maps to the division operator. The reason this is happening is that
Factor is a tool for combinatory logic, not lambda calculus. Lambda
calculus is centered on the idea of doing, Forth (and Factor)
are
based on the idea of combination.

So again:

F> 12 4 /
3


Now for the final basic operation.
4 from 12 leaves...

Hmm, here the most natural mapping is reverse from infix:

F> 4 12 -
8


So my opinion is that children may have problems with mathematics
because they are forced into trying to do a bunch of things which seem
foreign to them.

If instead, they simply were allowed to build physical models of the
math operations and then express these models in English, then finally
plug these models into a postfix computing language, they would be
much more successful in their learning.

I spent my early years memorizing multiplication tables and solving
multiplication problems without any real practical idea of what
multiplication really was.