Wednesday Class

The parade square of the university. Cool right?? Looks like some scene from the Taiwan/china drama series.If you have looked at the earlier post, there is some proverbs by confusion along the streets. The school have signs like this all over the place. I think there are 6 sign boards in every classroom.

The classic china classroom!!
Our 2nd chinese language class. Han characters and Han language. 汉字与汉语。The past words and development of chinese characters. Interesting class. I thought it will be those type of class, where you learn new words and how to form sentences using them, just like primary school. But thank god that it is not.

I learned that the 4 grestest invention by the chinese is The Compass, Gunpowder, Paper, Printing.

Though not a big fan of it, attending this class I agree with the teacher that the fifth greatest invention is the Han Language.

The English language only consist of 26 alphabets, and words are formed by arranging the alphabets in an order.

Students learning chinese have to learn around 3500 to 5000 Han characters in primary and secondary school, and there are many other characters which are not learned in school. Each Han character is different from the other, the pinyin (pronunciation) might be similar, but each character has a different meaning.

>story i heard in class<

47 years ago, there was this scholar that said that there are too many illiterate and there were too many Han characters, it is too difficult to learn and difficult to type out, so he invented the pinyin, in roman characters.

There was this time when the newspapers were in the form of pinyin. so words like move 动（dong) are written as dong, but there are other words that have the same pronunciation 东(north) 洞(hole) 冬(winter) 懂(understand) and many more. It took the type writers less time to type the roman characters, but it took the readers longer time to understand the message. The Becasue each Han character represent something different, it was easier for readers to understand the message at one glance. So chinese newspapers went back to Han chacacters but, pinyin was used as teaching material.

The circle with two pointed shapes below at the right represent the sun, fire and mountain.

This class is fun ^^ seriously fun.