A Brief Reflection

I decided to use this last passion blog to do a reflection on my journey of making the series of video “Origin of Chinese Characters”. It is something I never experienced before and I truly appreciate I chose this topic and stuck with it this semester.

For this first 17 years in my life, I spoke Chinese. And I love Chinese. There is a worrisome trend happening in China among younger generations that foreign language is cool and Chinese is just “Nah”. Since we speak this language every day, it becomes not as charming as other others. However, for me, Chinese is so beautiful, for both the calligraphy and their rhythms.

According to a thesis paper, I found online, it says due to the abstract and symbolic feature of Chinese Characters, “Chinese mode of conceptualization is thought – intuitive, concrete, analogical, and imaginative” (Jia). It is further explained by another research paper “Chinese Language, Chinese Mind?”, saying one important feature of Chinese language lack of inflection, which means each word does not belong to a certain word group, saying verb, noun, or conjunction. This trait makes Chinese sentence generally shorter than the sentence in Germanic or Latin languages.

In my eyes, it is these very characteristics of Chinese make it so uniquely beautiful. Its complexity gives it an abundant variability. Compare to other languages, Chinese is more content sensible, which requires the speaker to dive into the situation of current or referencing conversation. One needs to be truly focused to understand the real meaning of others’ saying.

Among all the different aspects of learning Chinese, I am most passionate about ancient Chinese, which is not used nowadays anymore. It is more succinct and closer to the roots of Chinese culture. Relative to modern Chinese, ancient Chinese utilize features mentioned above more throughout. A detailed article can be written in hundreds of words. It focuses more on symmetric structures of sentences and matching rhymes. Not a single character can be deleted but the meaning is so rich; not every meaning is expressed directly from the word but hidden between lines.

Just looking into the characters, themselves, they are such an art for me. Because of the graphics origin of the characters, I can see the trace of natural elements in each one of them. Throughout this semester of making the video, I am shocked by the well-formed and complex system of developing Chinese characters. Characters are related to nature and also related to each other. I am so proud of saying Chinese is my first language, as well as my favorite languages.

More about this picture. I ask my friend to write this ancient Chinese poem since his hand writing is so beautiful. This is one of my favorite ancient Chinese poem, 登幽州台歌. I found a version of translation online somehow express the meaning of this poem but still not fully:

The wise ancestors are long gone, There is no future emperor in sight; Across the vast land I sing this song, Weeping alone for my sad plight.

(http://lotusandcedar.blogspot.com/2008/08/english-translation-climbing-you-zhou.html)

Then I think up this translation myself:

Ancestors are gone,

Followers are none,

In this vast universe I weep and sing the song,

Alone.

Reference:

https://web.uri.edu/iaics/files/12-Yuxin-Jia-Xuerui-Jia.pdf

http://wittgensteinrepository.org/agora-ontos/article/viewFile/2031/2230