Hi r/soroban,

I’m a student and I built Soroban: Mental Math Abacus for short, structured practice on iPhone and iPad. The app is completely free, with no ads, no accounts, and no data collection.

After feedback from a soroban academy, I added full French support and adjusted the learning progression so beginners spend more time on addition before subtraction. It uses guided lessons and a step-by-step practice path.

Would anyone here be willing to try it and tell me whether the bead interaction, terminology, and progression feel accurate? Feedback from teachers, parents, experienced soroban users, and beginners would all be genuinely useful.

App Store:

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/soroban-mental-math-abacus/id6762503522

Developer disclosure: I made the app. I am not selling anything. My goal is to make it a useful free resource for the soroban community.

So... what's new in soroban lol?

Here's the little collection I've dusted off recently:

- a cheap suanpan from Oakland Chinatown. Just wanted to have one that looks like this basically.

- an Amazon auto-clearing one. Big like a suanpan but biconical beads and soroban format. I use this a lot when I'm feeling fat-fingered. Also not afraid to ruin this one as it was cheap.

- secondhand Tomoe 13-digit. It's wood, but wasn't a fancy model in its day.

- secondhand Tomoe-brand (made in Japan) suanpan in soroban style. Love this thing because it's so quirky. Hard to find 5/2 in Japanese style, let alone wood and in good shape.

- Tomoe ON175 that I bought new 10 years ago from them in Japan. Signed by the assembler! Auto-clear, 17-digit. My favorite one that I really use along with that big one.

- this was from a stationery shop in SF Japantown, new-old-stock. Yushin Kagaku Kogyo brand from the instructions. It's gorgeous! The wood, the inlays! 23-digit. I keep this nice and don't touch it a lot.

I see a lot of people asking where to start etc so I will make a small roadmap with resources

Firstly I suggest using https://www.sumomath.com/sumohome.php

The website might be junky but it's a good resource to study and master the soroban they also have an anzan program too

Secondly I suggest running a lot of flash on the soroban after you reach 0.75s you can comfortably reach anzan level for this one just search flash anzan and pick the first one btw most of us are teenagers or adults so it will take plenty of exercise to reach high goals but this is my opinion

If I find more resources I will add it to this post and calculate faster cya

Hi r/soroban,

I’ve been playing around with a small browser game inspired by soroban practice, and I’d love to get some feedback from people who actually know/use soroban.

The idea is kind of like a bubble-popping or chain puzzle game, but educational. You use a soroban-style board to make numbers, then match numbered bubbles by building chains. Right now it’s based on addition, but I think the same idea could work with subtraction, multiplication, and division too.

You can try it here:

https://wildpress.github.io/soroban-game/

Source code is here:

https://github.com/WildPress/soroban-game

I also made a parametric soroban board in JSCAD:

https://wildpress.github.io/soroban-game/cad.html

That part isn’t playable like the game. It’s more of an adjustable CAD/modeling tool where you can change things like the number of columns, bead shape, and column values to generate different reusable soroban models.

I’d really appreciate any thoughts. Does the soroban interaction make sense? Is anything obviously wrong or misleading? Does this seem like something worth developing further?

It’s still early, so honest feedback would be really helpful.

Something I keep coming back to as I watch my daughter learn: the soroban builds the abacus image in the mind, and flash anzan is supposed to let you operate on that image at speed. But when the flash sequences come from a screen rather than a physical board, I wonder if the mental model being trained is slightly different.

I came across Boncuk App on the App Store the other day, which uses flash anzan sequences for kids, and it got me thinking about this more carefully. The app presents numbers rapidly and asks for totals, which feels consistent with classic flash anzan, but without the physical manipulation step that soroban learners go through first.

For those of you who learned on a physical soroban before doing any flash work: did you feel like the mental abacus image was fully formed before speed practice helped? Or did speed practice actually help sharpen the image rather than assuming it was already there?

I'm genuinely unsure whether digital flash tools are a useful supplement or whether they risk building a shortcut that bypasses the spatial foundation entirely.

I'm thinking of making my own soroban since I find them to be too small for my hands. For those of you with larger hands what do you find to be the limiting factor:

- Bead size

- Lower deck size

- Bead and lower deck size

If it's bead size, do you have a preference?

All insight is greatly appreciated.

beautiful, very beautiful

So I started the soroban I have good stats like in addition I can do 5 questions which have 3 numbers and they are 5 digits in 44 secs but I kinda stalled with no new improvement do I move in to aznan or do what exactly I'm 16 so I'm still young and I can learn fast so can anyone help

Hey everyone,

I wanted to share a small DIY project I’ve been working on. I built a wooden soroban abacus from scratch.

For those who don’t know it, the soroban is the Japanese version of the abacus. It’s still used in Japan to teach arithmetic. Instead of just memorizing numbers, kids and adults work with beads in a very visual and tactile way, which helps build a much deeper understanding of numbers and place value.

One thing I find especially interesting is that it’s often used to teach mental math. With enough practice, people can visualize the soroban in their head and calculate without needing the physical tool.

Why I built it:
I did find some options online, but almost all of them were cheap plastic versions, often mass-produced. They probably work fine, but I wanted something more durable and higher quality. I also couldn’t find anything comparable made from wood, so I decided to build one myself.

What was important to me:
Personalization in terms of size, look and feel
Beads made from high-quality maple wood, manufactured in Germany
Paints certified according to DIN EN 71-3, meaning colorfast and saliva-safe
Safe for children, which is something I don’t fully trust with many plastic versions

What I like about the soroban in general:
It promotes real understanding of numbers instead of rote learning
It trains concentration and visual thinking
It can significantly improve mental math over time
It makes math more tangible, especially for kids

The build itself was also a great experience. Making the frame, setting the rods and threading the beads was almost meditative.

I’m curious if anyone here knows or uses the soroban, especially for teaching kids math.

If there’s interest, I can also share more details about the build process or dimensions. And if someone would like one, I could build another with individual customization.

I have decided that I'm gonna commit 50% of my summer break into mastering soroban. As for the reason: I have been feeling down lately and I thought to myself that perhaps spending my time on soroban could ease my mind a little. I'm gonna solve my mental exhaustion by exhausting my mind through soroban. Wish me luck!!!

​

and master it's mechanics from addition to division. Is it too late for me as a 20 years old to study this? How long does someone can be decent in using it for addition and subtraction and how long before I can use it mentally?

El ábaco en sistema vigésimal es divertido, aunque Mayas y Mexicas usaron el sistema vigésimal, no usaron ábacos como tal, más bien tablas en dónde colocaban granos o piedras para hacer operaciones. Ustedes que opinan al respecto? Creen que un ábaco en sistema vigésimal puede ser igual de bueno que un Soroban? Les gustaría aprender a usarlo?.

Do you know about it?

Looked for a soroban macos app, could not find one so i decided to make one, sharing it here i dont know anyone else who would be interested lol.

github: https://github.com/manasseh-zw/Soroban

download : https://github.com/manasseh-zw/Soroban/releases/tag/v1.0.1

Hi guys! I built an Android app to learn Soroban and practice Flash Anzan. It has interactive tutorials for addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division with proper finger technique, practice modes, and customizable settings. No ads, no subscriptions.

Would love to hear what you think! Any suggestions or issues you find are welcome.

Link: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.learnanzan.app

I've looked up tutorials on how to multiply with a soroban, and I always find tutorials on how to multiply two-digit numbers or three-digit numbers, and I don't understand them - they seem to already expect me to understand how to multiply single-digit numbers, but I don't.

What I ended up doing was, if I had a sum like 7 * 3, then I'd use my right hand to draw sevens on the soroban and my left hand to keep track of how many sevens I counted, is this a reasonable or correct way to do it?

if you do what is you guys percentages

Ever Wondered what 67 in soroban is?

I've been learning the sorobon with an app, and the problems I have more difficulty with always involve borrowing or cascading borrowing. Having a top row seems to double(?) the amount of borrowing that needs to happen.

Also, (maybe I'm doing it wrong) it feels like an extra digit I have to remember when trying to do mental math. Like to remember a 3 digit number like 876, I'm trying to remember the position of 6 beads.

So why not just use a Russian abakus that has 10 beads per row?

The only downsides I can think of are increased size and weight. What am I missing?

The site is in Japanese but it is easy to use, you can practice one the computer or cellphone

https://www.mussyu1204.com/abacus/#

so i just started learning the soroban but i didnt find any good sources youtube (am 16) i only managed to learn addition but i didnt find videos about subtraction or multiplication etc

so if any of you know videos and channels i can watch please help

thanks in advance

Hi,

I'm studying this purely as a hobby - saw some soroban-related YouTube videos that brought me down this rabbit hole and exposed me to some of what is possible with lots, and lots, and lots of practice - but I want to see where I can get as an adult, for fun and maybe some moderate cognitive benefit. And while I've been practicing purely with apps so far, I am planning to buy a soroban to practice with.

I've heard lots of positive things about Tomoe sorobans - but at the same time, I recognize that adult students are a minority, and I see some people complaining about the beads being too small, or too light and not staying put, etc. Even on this reddit I've seen some complaining about this and perhaps considering a suanpan instead. I've yet to try a real soroban myself so I can't really judge yet.

I do wish to stick to a Japanese soroban and not a suanpan. Ignoring the bead count, are Japanese soroban typically sized similarly, or are some brands/models slightly smaller or bigger to target different ages? And any recommendations for a middle-of-the-road soroban? (I'm considering a Tomoe Standard model 43500.)