One Character, One Story: The Past and Present Life of Chinese Characters

Writing came into being with the progress of civilization. The world's three oldest scripts: cuneiform, ancient Egyptian sacred script, and Chinese oracle bone script. With the exception of Chinese characters, which have continued from the oracle bones, the other two scripts have faded into history with the demise of their cultures.

Chinese characters are a unique symbol, a beautiful language, a unique art with rich cultural connotations.

According to legend, the Yellow Emperor in the ancient times had a historian named Cang Jie, who had four eyes and was particularly smart, so when he saw the traces of birds and beasts, he was inspired to make words. "This is the story of Cangjie's creation of characters, which has been passed down since the end of the Warring States period.

The Chinese character has evolved over thousands of years, from the first oracle bone script, to the golden script, to the Warring States script, to the seal script, to the official script, to the regular script that most of us use now. In the long history, although some Chinese characters are far away from their original images, they still retain the soul of hieroglyphics, and there is still some kind of correlation between the image of the characters and the things themselves.

Among the characters currently used in the world, only Chinese characters are characterized by their ideograms and hieroglyphs, reflecting the long history and deep cultural heritage of the Chinese nation.

The Super Fun Storybook of Chinese Characters, edited by Dr. Chia-Ling Chen of National Taiwan Normal University, is based on the Shuowen Jiezi (Explaining Characters in Chinese), and introduces 152 common modern Chinese characters, introducing the history of Chinese oracle bone inscriptions, gold inscriptions, and seal scripts, and the process of their evolution. The program is designed to help children understand how traditional culture has evolved and adapted to the times, and how to carry on the tradition in a rational way.

Each Chinese character has its own history, its own tradition, and its own process of evolution. After reading this book, children will realize that Chinese characters are so interesting!

(1) Lively content and diverse forms

The author himself is a Taiwanese, and has read some children's works written by Taiwanese authors. The language is funny, the lines are easy to read, and the unique sense of humor of the Taiwanese is very well expressed. The same is true for the book "Super Funny Chinese Character Storybook". Some of the subgroups, such as "Beautiful Chinese Characters", "Stylish Chinese Characters" and "Quirky Chinese Characters" are so funny that readers can't help but want to find out more. The reader is left wanting to find out more.

In addition, the book is very up-to-date in terms of specific content, and uses many new words in the book as small points of interest, which makes it fun to read and attracts children's curiosity in a way that many traditional authors can't.

For example, "Chinese characters for beautiful women", "Chinese characters for men", "Chinese characters for weird people", etc. are very interesting.

The word "thunder", for example, has appeared on the Internet in the last few years as "thunder man" and "thunder rolls in the sky". These words appear every year, and when they first appeared, even people like us who are not very old had a hard time understanding them, not to mention explaining them to our children. Here the author explains the past and present life of "雷", and explains that the current word "雷" on the Internet now means "shock". There is also an ancient kanji "靐" which is used by the new humans to mean to be frightened.

Similarly, there are also explanations of the characters "囧", "闪", and "乾", which are very interesting and allow readers to learn a lot of history, culture, and general knowledge of the characters without even realizing it.

(2) The book is beautifully framed, in line with children's reading aesthetics

Super Fun Chinese Characters Storybook is beautifully framed, and I was very surprised when I first got the book, I didn't expect the book to be so beautifully crafted.

The cover of the book is a simple but meaningful painting of hieroglyphs, which is very comfortable to look at. The paper used for the book cover is a very thick paper with a bit of wrinkles, the feel is very good, holding in the hand there is a kind of heavy history.

In the organization of the content, the book is divided into four chapters, each chapter is divided into a number of small units. Each chapter is divided into a number of sub-units, and each sub-unit is organized into a group of four characters, which is a theme, such as "Botanical Chinese Characters", "Natural Chinese Characters", etc. Each sub-unit is organized into a group of four characters, which is a theme.

Each character is divided into two pages, the first page introduces the origin of the character, what it means in ancient times, what changes have taken place in the process of historical evolution, astronomy, geography, plants, animals and humanities. The introduction of each word is not long, but can see the breadth and depth of the author's research, there is no deep theoretical foundation, it is not possible in such a short period of time to the past life of a word introduced so comprehensive.

Finally, there is a "Did you know" section for each character, which adds knowledge about the character, cultural knowledge, and so on, and is equivalent to an extended reading of the character, and the content of this section includes history, legends, folk tales, geography, and characters, which is all-encompassing. Each story is accompanied by beautiful illustrations, which are closely related to the Chinese characters to be introduced. It is a very good form of subtle reading of Chinese language and characters, traditional Chinese aesthetics, and expansion of knowledge.

(3) Systematic understanding of Chinese characters from the process of their evolution

The Super Interesting Chinese Character Storybook introduces the past and present life of Chinese characters from the original meaning of their creation and the process of their evolution, which is a very effective way to understand Chinese characters.

When I got this book, my child told me with delight that they have similar ancient Chinese characters in their writing textbooks, which she looks at and writes every time, but doesn't really know what they mean.

This relates to the way children are taught to recognize characters nowadays. Schools and parents only draw children's attention to how Chinese characters are written and read, but rarely address how the character came to be and what its origin is. This also makes the child feel bored and find the language boring and difficult to learn.

When our children were young and recognizing words, we consciously went to tell her the process of generating each word, the meaning of the origin, and how to remember it more convenient to go to the museum, to see the oracle bones together with those oracle bones corresponding to the present which Chinese characters, can you recognize it? Personally, I think that when teaching children, explaining the process of each character, its ancient meaning, present meaning, and how to write it is very helpful to the systematic mastery of Chinese characters. However, due to limited knowledge, many times it is just a superficial introduction. But this book is different, under the explanation of Dr., each character seems to be alive in front of the children, making friends with them, so that they can understand the Chinese characters clearly.

Taking "mother" as an example, the character was formed by adding two dots to the oracle bone character for "female", which represents the image of a mother. Later, the Jin script added hairpins to the head, and the Warring States script, the seal script and the official script all removed the kneeling strokes from the script form, which eventually evolved into the current character for "mother".

At the same time, the "Mother's Flower" was introduced, telling the children how worried their mothers are about their children who have traveled far and how rare their love is. It is important to remember their mother's kindness and to be good to them for the rest of their lives.

This enables children to learn by example when they look at the characters, and at the same time allows them to learn about traditional Chinese culture through the characters, which is very much in line with the current educational orientation.

(4) Finding the link between "children's thinking" and "thinking with Chinese characters"

Chinese characters are a unique script of the Chinese nation, with its structure originating from graphics, which is a kind of cognition and thinking of our ancestors about nature, the world, and philosophy. Therefore, from the form and structure of Chinese characters, if you are careful, you can often find some points of convergence between Chinese characters and the surrounding environment, which is the thinking of Chinese characters.

But for children and teenagers, they are better at thinking in images, and they know the meaning of concrete things only when they see them, and it is often difficult for them to accept abstract things. If you can pass on the correct "thinking about Chinese characters" to your children, and "teach them to fish", then you will have enough independent learning awareness in your future studies to be able to understand more words, and to be able to have a great interest in language learning, which will result in a positive feedback. The first thing I'd like to say is that I'm not sure I'm going to be able to do this.

So how do you bridge the gap between "children's minds" and "Chinese character minds"? The Super Fun Chinese Character Storybook gives a good answer.

The book creates a good context, through hieroglyphs, stories, and pictures, so that children can combine the characters with concrete situations. In this way, through constant repetition, children are guided to touch the thinking of the Chinese characters, to explore the beauty behind the Chinese characters, to link the configuration with the meaning, and to inspire their thoughts through interesting stories, so that they can find out how to connect "children's thinking" and "Chinese character thinking". Through the use of interesting stories to inspire their thoughts, they will find the link between "children's thinking" and "thinking with Chinese characters".

This cognitive process is also in line with the child's psychological growth process, from image thinking to abstract thinking needs a process, needs the corresponding scene, if simply rote memorization, then the effect must not be ideal.

On second thought, not only the language, but also all cognitively related subjects. Only by understanding the causes and consequences of the knowledge points, in order to be able to integrate, in order to link all the knowledge, to form their own system, and ultimately into their own thinking that is inseparable from a flash point.

Previously, there was a question in Zhihu, where is the biggest difference between foreign and Chinese textbooks? The very important point mentioned is that foreign textbooks read very "wordy", he defaulted to what you do not know, what you need to know, will be the knowledge of the break apart of the crumpling of the repeated speech, and ultimately smooth into the first year of high school learning. This kind of "nagging" is exactly what we need in our current education. The Super Fun Chinese Character Storybook is very much in line with this kind of thinking, and can be a very good supplementary teaching material for children's spare time study.

Chen Yinke, a master of Chinese literature, said, "According to the standard of exegesis, any interpretation of a word is a cultural history." This may sound exaggerated in the ordinary people, but the Chinese language and literature, the charm of the Chinese characters that are recognized worldwide, the depth of the Chinese characters is also unparalleled, can be said to have a thousand meanings, the mystery is infinite.

The traditional culture of the Chinese people, the supreme wisdom of our ancestors, is embedded in the shape of each Chinese character. One character, one story, can let children feel that our country's Chinese characters are so charming, our country's culture is so deep, our country is as beautiful as a picture, and the Chinese characters we write are as beautiful as a picture!