Sorry, I hadn't been to that thread. Thanks for the links.
I look at that method and it seems totally counterintuitive. I guess I've never had any trouble with place values and borrowing and all that. It's perfectly clear to me why you take one away from the next place to add ten to the one that needs it. It's not at all clear to me why you would add ten to the one that needs it and then add something to something else. I can see that it does the same thing, but I can't see it being at all easy to explain to someone who doesn't know how to subtract. Am I missing something?
In the American method you may have to reach way over to the left to "borrow across zeroes. It's totally unnecessary. The American method makes multidigit subtraction look ten times harder than it really is.
