4chan

That's surprisingly accurate, as people here are highlighting (it makes geometrical sense when dealing with complex numbers).

My nephew once asked me this question. The way that I explained it was like this:

• the friend of my friend is my friend; (+1)*(+1) = (+1)
• the enemy of my friend is my enemy; (+1)*(-1) = (-1)
• the friend of my enemy is my enemy; (-1)*(+1) = (-1)
• the enemy of my enemy is my friend; (-1)*(-1) = (+1)

It's a different analogy but it makes intuitive sense, even for kids. And it works nice as mnemonic too.

It's not that hard.

If you have -3 -3s and I give you one, you now only have -2 -3s. If you want to get to a total of -6, I have to hand over 4 more -3s to get there, the first 3 of them just being what's needed to get you to 0 and out of deficit. Now you get to hold onto the next two I hand over, and now you have 2 -3s which total -6. But that's 15 worth of -3s I had to hand over to get you there and -6 + 15 = 9, like -3 × -3 does too.

Negative numbers aren "real". Like 0, they're just a concept used to represent something, deficit.

Lmao not gonna lie, this would be a very intuitive way of teaching a kid negative values.