Learning to speak in another language.

I associate words with numbers in other words see below:

1 yī
2 èr
3 sān
4 sì
5 wǔ
6 liù
7 qī
8 bā
9 jiǔ
10 shí­

notice no English only the target language
say I have to do multiplication then I would write it like this yi X yi = yi, yi x er = er, etc. It is a lot easier to associate numbers with the target language.