learning – meiadeleite.com

The sky was black and earth yellow; space and time vast, limitless
Sun high or low, moon full or parsed; with stars and lodges spread in place
Cold arrives then heat once more; Autumn’s harvest, Winter’s store
Extra days round out the years; scale in tune with sun and spheres…

from a postcard i’ve recently received, i discovered that the chinese have a rhyming poem with a thousand different characters, which kids used to learn in school, as part of the character-learning process… how weird and wonderful is that?!

it’s called 千字文 and was written by Zhou Xingsi, about 1500 years ago.

a bit of history, from this archived page:

According to legend, Emperor Wu (ruled AD 502-547) of Liang sought a Chinese character literacy text for his son, and to this end had scholars select a thousand non-redundant characters from work left behind by famed calligrapher Wang Xizhi (AD 321-379) to be put to rhyme by the widely learned and talented scholar Zhou Xingsi, who also wrote China’s earliest extant example of a type of historical study known as a Shi Lu or “Factual Record”, the Liang Huangdi Shi Lu. Zhou now applied his heart and soul to the task and created a full rhyming text of four-character couplets, eight characters per line in seven chapters, in only one night; legend also has it that his hair and beard went completely white during those momentous hours. The imperial heir for whom it was written in turn grew up to close the circle by compiling the “Wen Xuan”.

The resulting Qian Zi Wen or Thousand Character Essay was, in the centuries that followed, distributed throughout the Chinese-reading world and has ever since been a major source of inspiration for calligraphers, due in part to its unique feature of non-repeating characters, and for Chinese schoolteachers, tutors, students and general readers as well. This was true especially throughout the ages when a grasp of the classical language was the key to success in traditional China.

the whole thing started with meteor garden, a netflix series that our friends were watching at the beginning of the year. we watched a few episodes with them in thailand in the hopes of catching glimpses of shanghai, but while we were seeing it, a strange and magical thing happened: all these chinese words buried in a dark corner of my brain for over 10 years, came back all in a rush of familiar tones and expressions. suddenly i really wanted to understand things again, i wanted more!

so since then i’ve watched a few of these series. here are 5 ~~series~~ c-dramas i’ve enjoyed lately:

meteor garden started me on this road, so it had to go first. it’s a netflix remake of a taiwanese series, but with mainland characters. it takes place in shanghai, where dong shancai is a university student that stumbles on a gang of 4 boys who think they’re kings of the world… adventures ensue! it’s mostly silly and light – but also very infuriating at times. i guess this is why they’re called dramas in asia. :D

i found a love so beautiful after searching for shen yue, the main character of the previous series. in this series, we follow her fumbling attempts at confessing her love for her childhood crush from high school till adulthood. it’s generally cutesy and light-hearted, but you can see how tough high school is for kids in china, especially as the dreaded university entrance exam draws in.

following hu yi tian (the male lead on the previous series), led me to go go squid! where he plays a supporting role — and it also lead me the world of e-sports. i’m glad it did, because this was a fun series to watch! like stepping into a parallel reality, it was amazing to see how intense the world of e-sports is in china and many other countries. i laughed out loud at their idea of what norway looks like though — i can’t imagine it has these many skyscrapers… :D

after that, i found some more dramas on the theme of e-sports and now i know more vocabulary about gaming than i’ll ever need, but i still find it fascinating. love O2O mixes a bit of game fantasy scenes with real world interactions and i liked the story quite a bit as well — it’s an adaptation of a novel by gu man, a chinese writer whose books have been so popular that a few of them have been made into tv series. the support cast is hilarious and yang yang is a darling, but the female lead… ouch. please, someone feed that kid. :(

(sorry, couldn’t find a subtitled trailer!)

and last but not least, boss & me, another drama based on one of gu man’s novels. also titled “shanshan comes to eat”, it’s mostly a happy series following a girl’s misadventures as a new employee in her company, where she eventually falls in love with her boss. she really enjoys eating and was hired to the company not because of her unspectacular accounting skills, but because she has “panda blood“, aka Rh-, which in China is said to be as rare as pandas.

so that’s it — five silly dramas that i’ve watched and recommend, if you have some time and would like to brush up on chinese vocabulary and listening skills. it’s a nice complement to more boring (but necessary) aspects of chinese learning, such as grammar or character writing practice. i’ve set myself a goal to take a higher level of the HSK exam in 1-2 years, and these higher level exams all have a speaking component, so i’m going to need all the practice i can get. wish me luck! :)