Current status

I currently have passed these official levels per the Soroban League of North America:

• Abacus: 6-kyu
• Anzan: 6-kyu

(The Soroban League of North America appears to follow the same testing/leveling framework as the Japanese "Zenshuren", or properly Zenkoku Shuzan Kyouiku Renmei (全国珠算教育連盟).)

At the time of writing, I am already likely at the level to pass the Abacus 5-kyu and Anzan 5-kyu and 4-kyu exams. I need a bit more practice for the Anzan 3-kyu exam but expect to be able to pass it when the time comes. I think I will be taking these exams in November and December.

But first, I have the Oral Abacus and Oral Abacus exams coming up next month. For those, I presently have no official level, but I am expecting to take and pass 2-kyu for abacus and 3-kyu for anzan. (I don't know if these are an official Zenshuren-type level or something else.)

What this means

I don't know if there is an official, freely-available "spec" for what is contained in each of the levels per Zenshuren or the Soroban League of North America, but here is what I know about my current levels:

• Abacus: I'm targeting 5-kyu. This means multiplying 2- and 4-digit numbers, dividing 5 digit numbers by 3 digit numbers, and doing addition/subtraction of series of 3 and 4 digit numbers, using a soroban.

• Anzan: I'm targeting 3-kyu. This means multiplying 1- and 3-digit numbers or two 2-digit numbers, dividing 3-4 digit numbers by 1-2 digit numbers, and adding sequences of 2-digit numbers, mentally. No abacus, no writing out the calculation - just writing the answer.

• Oral Abacus: My focus is 2-kyu, where basically I add sequences of 5 to 7 digit numbers at relatively high speeds. 2-kyu is pretty comfortable for me. I am also practicing the 1-kyu material, which focuses more on the 7 digit side with higher speed where the slightest hesitation can easily mean you won't be able to keep up. 1-kyu is still rather difficult for me and I rarely can answer the questions the first time they're asked.

• Oral Anzan: I'm targeting 4-kyu and practicing 3-kyu. 4-kyu is all two-digit number mental addition, and this is... getting easier, but I'm not going to call it "easy" yet; it's taken a lot of practice to get to where I can visualize things well enough to handle these questions without repeating them multiple times. 3-kyu is seemingly more difficult sequences of 2-digit numbers (maybe more carries and such?), as well as some problems involving both 2- and 3-digit numbers.

On Anzan

Anzan is... fascinating, but difficult.

People sometimes talk about only being able to keep a few things in your brain at the same time, e.g. 2 to 4 things is what I generally hear nowadays. And of course, things which are mentally "chunked" can be counted as a single thing, e.g. the number 317 might be only one thing instead of 3 separate things.

Visualizing the soroban, at first, seems like it really pushes against this. Take that number 317 - in arabic numerals, that is at most 3 things to remember. On the abacus, that is in a way 7 things to remember - 3 beads for 3, 1 for 1, and 3 (a 5 and two 1's) for 7. So one might naively think - sure, there's mental chunking, but surely this won't scale.

I think the chunking does end up working mentally - as you get more used to the beads, you can remember each number's beads as one collection of beads and thus one chunk. And as you get more used to it, those chunks perhaps widen to contain multiple digits. So, if I'm trying to remember the number 97, I don't have to remember 8 things - I remember two, maybe even just one, as I can recognize the shape of each number on the abacus and their shape relative to each other.

And doing the calculations using a mental abacus - it really does seem faster, and maybe even easier.

As an adult learner, I have decades of experience doing mental math just using numerals. And this is doable, but hard - e.g. 87 + 58: OK, 8+5 is 13, 7+8 is basically 7-2 with a 10 added to the side, so 13+1 is 14 in the tens spot, 5 left: 145, right? There's tricks for this, and familiarity helps, etc. But on the mental abacus? I see the 87, the 5 means I drop a 5 bead and add a 100, the 8 has a familiar motion where I subtract 2 and add 1 next to it. The end result: exactly the same.

And yes, the way I just described this deliberately shows some parallels, as for non-abacus mental math we often use similar shortcuts and ways of thinking of things to do the calculations. But: doing this visually, now that I've gotten used to it - it just seems easier. And if I try to do multiple additions in sequence - I can clearly see the difference. I struggle to keep the digits straight in my head if I add it "normally", while if I do it visually, it seems more like a quick mechanical manipulation. As long as I can keep the visualization steady, I can do it quicker and easier mentally if I use the mental abacus.

Now, as an adult, the "curse" I have to deal with - which is also true for children who start studies later on - is that I have this non-abacus model of mental addition that I am also used to. There's a voice in my head which is saying the numbers out loud, and as I go through step by step, at least as I started to study anzan, this basically meant that after each mental addition that I was re-stating the current total in my head, whether to help reinforce the image or to half depend on that for the calculation itself. It took some time for this to quiet down - and I won't say it's fully quieted down. But it has gotten quieter. I do calculations in my head, and sometimes I'll hear the number in my head, but other times I'll just have a clear image of the beads and listen for the next number to add. This is an odd feeling - I may literally have no idea how much I've added so far in terms of verbal numbers until I reach the end of the calculation, at which time I'll read the beads in my head back into numerals, type in my answer, and seemingly like a miracle, get it right. Seeing this time and time again has been a really fascinating experience as it shows in very concrete terms that I have taught my brain a completely new way of thinking.

On my overall journey

The more that I've seen my progress - and I think honestly the biggest surprise has been my progress with anzan, which is not merely fast calculation but training my brain to do a completely new and different way of doing something - the more that I've come to realize that, while I may be getting older, my brain is fully capable of not just learning new things, but in some ways of growing beyond what I was capable of at a younger age. I enjoy the physical soroban and want to keep getting better at it as I simply find it fun, challenging, and also like the cultural aspect of it as well. But the anzan skills I've built - both from dedicated anzan practice and the supporting skills from soroban practice - that has legitimately given me confidence in a way that I frankly did not expect I would experience.

I've heard about soroban being great for not just teaching kids arithmetic at a very advanced level, but also for building confidence, discipline, and for getting a feeling of accomplishment as you move through the levels, or participate in the competitions, or use these skills in the classroom and find that you are doing things easily that your peers are struggling with. That all makes sense, and those are all great reason to have kids study soroban. And as an adult, it's very easy to think "I've already developed past that stage, there's just not enough benefit to justify the time and money, I'm already successful in my career and really see no need for this". Honestly, to a partial degree this was me as well. I'm a bit of a Japanophile so I had an interest from that perspective, but the primary reason I decided to do this was for brain training, as I have previously described. But - in addition to helping me to address my mental capability concerns, I'm experiencing some of these same benefits. The regular homework has made me more disciplined about my outside-of-work studies. I've seen my error rates go down and my focus sharpen - very concretely, as my eyes don't drift to adjacent problems as much as they used to. And I have acquired a confidence in my own abilities that I have not felt in years, maybe even decades. In this "age of AI", where the worth of a human software developer is at times coming into question, I find myself more confident in my ability to not just keep up with my colleagues, but to be able to keep my skills up and not become fully dependent on these new tools. I can use AI, I can use the new tools, but I retain my abilities and my pride, and I know that my mind still has worth.

Anyway - it's been a fun journey, and something tells me that I'm just getting started.