For today’s ICR, we observed a private Chinese language lesson taught by instructor Tian Tan. She began the class with a Chinese poem that Elon Musk had posted and captioned “Humankind.” The poem was about how beans are cooked in the same pot and all come from the same roots. Yet, they attack each other in the pot, like humankind does, even though we all come from the same human roots. The poem comes from the Three Kingdoms era in Chinese history and a famous poet wrote the poem in a short amount of time to avoid being executed by the king. With this important poem, he proved his great poetry skills.
We watched Tan teach the student about Chinese radicals next. Each character in the language is derived from a root word, which is a similar concept used in English. The characters are so intricate and confusing, since I don’t know the language, so it was a little hard to follow the lesson. The student understood the content, however, and would explain what each radical meant by looking at the root.
While Tan and the student talked more about words and characters, we were given a water brush and a calligraphy cloth to practice writing characters. Tan explained that each character should be made in one or two brush strokes, either up to down or left to right. The brush is also supposed to be held perpendicular to the paper, rather than diagonally like English writers do. The cloth was really cool since the water turned the cloth black anywhere you placed the brush tip. Although I didn’t know what I was really writing, it was cool to practice writing the characters and see how different the Chinese and English languages are so different from each other in several ways.