How did we turn a very interesting learning into something very dull?

Is Chinese difficult? Ask ten people and ten will answer: extremely difficult. But this is a huge misunderstanding. We've made a simple thing complicated, an easy thing difficult, and an interesting thing dull.

 

Why do I say this?

 

Let's look at a few examples.

 

How many of these four characters (song typeface) do you recognize, possibly none.

 

But what about the following

 

 

How many of these four do you recognize? Possibly two or more.

 

They are characters Mountain, Water, Sun, and Moon.

 

The four below are exactly same characters of the four above, they are in shell bone script, created and used in 3500+ years ago, the earliest Chinese characters which are pictography. Ancient Chinese just drew object to represent it.

 

The four above are song typeface, formed in Song Dynasty (960 – 1279), current standard Chinese script.

 

Is there a connection?

Yes.

The latter evolved from the former.

There are other scripts between them, the whole picture is like the following

 

 

 

From left to right: shell bone script, big script, small script, clerical script. After clerical script in Han Dynasty (202 BC – 220 AD), song typeface was formed around 1000 – 1200 (not show in the table above).

 

If you learn this way, you'll understand how each character originated, and you'll grasp the meaning of each stroke. This makes learning interesting and easier to remember.

 

Unfortunately we don’t teach the earlier forms, we start with the song typeface: 山，水，日，月. As a result, students don't know where these characters came from, why they are written in those way, and can only memorize them by rote. A potentially fascinating study becomes a tedious chore and very hard to remember thousands of Chinese characters. Thus, it feels difficult.

 

Why teach Chinese this way? Firstly, because after First Emperor burned the books and buried the scholars, the knowledge of shell bone script was lost until its rediscovery in 1899. So, for 2000 years, Chinese people didn't know about this pictographic form of writing. Secondly, it’s a shortcut. Isn’t it faster to learn the song typeface script directly? Why bother learning shell bone script, big seal script, small seal script, and clerical script? But this shortcut cuts off the evolutionary history of Chinese characters, turning them into cryptic symbols that seem to have fallen from the sky. When you don’t understand their meaning, you’re left with rote memorization. Thirdly, 100% Chinese language teachers did hear the pictography of Chinese characters, but 99%+ only know a few pictography of a few (less than ten) characters. They have to be trained before they can teach the pictography of Chinese characters. But neither the government nor the teachers have recognized the need for training, they feel very comfortable in the current system and don't feel any pressure to change. 

Therefore, not only do hundreds of millions of Chinese students have to continue to memorize by rote, but tens of thousands or millions of foreign students have to do the same.

 

Look at how a process that could be easy and interesting has become arduous and tedious. Now that we've identified the problem, it's up to you whether you want to abandon the arduous path of rote memorization and adopt a new method that involves understanding the pictographic and evolutionary nature of characters. The answer might seem simple, but it's not, due to inertia and because this learning method does not fit into the current Chinese language education system. I hope that one day people will realize we have to change, and we should embrace this easier, more interesting method that reflects the true nature of Chinese characters through their pictographic evolution.

 

If you are interested, I give four more characters for you to guess, to see how many you could guess right ?