千字文 Thousand Character Classic
bababardwan
January 17, 2011, 01:32 AM posted in General DiscussionSorry if I missed it, but I don't recall seeing the thousand character classic discussed before. Has anyone learnt it? Looks like a really worthwhile exercise. Any comments?
Here is a wiki article on it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thousand_Character_Classic
and here it is:
bababardwan
January 17, 2011, 01:59 AMWa, now that is strange. Now when I try to enter lines 19-42 I'm met with the message:
"! comment should be less than 5000 characters "
I guess y'all just have to take the extra step and click on this link:
http://www.yellowbridge.com/onlinelit/qianziwen.php
light487
January 17, 2011, 08:20 AMWell.. I've just begun a journey of learning 3,000 unique characters.. but I won't be learning it using this :) hehe
It is interesting that a poem could be constructed using 1,000 unique characters, that is, without repeating any character the whole way through. If you tried the same thing in English, even with only 26 characters.. you wouldn't get very far.. haha :)
It's not until you see masterpieces like this, that you don't truly appreciate the depth and flexibility of the Chinese language.
chris.k
Haha, to be fair, a closer parallel in English would probably be trying not to use any morpheme more than once (or, more practically, any word)... Still quite a bit tougher than in Chinese, I'd imagine.
bababardwan
January 17, 2011, 01:50 AMhehe, the funniest thing just happened. Under the above "here it is" I originally posted the whole 1000 character essay, but when I went to publish it I was met with the message:
"! Please enter content less than 5000 chars."
..hehe, of all the times to receive that message...just when I knew it couldn't be much more than 1000 characters. 莫名其妙！
I guess it doesn't hurt to publish it in bite size chunks for subthread discussion of those sections. But mainly I'd be interested in comments on the 1000 character classic in general. Has it been discussed before here on CPod [ I couldn't find it on a google search of CPod], and if so where? If not, that's somewhat surprising. I have a feeling we've discussed something similar. Particularly what kids learn, and the songs they learn.