Discover the beauty of Chinese characters

The outstanding creative works of Chinese characters "Words are in my heart" were exhibited at the Beijing International Chinese Language Training Institute.

The work "Snow" (bottom left) designed by Sa Yixin from Tajikistan won the Star Award. The picture shows him posing with his work. Photo courtesy of Tianjin Yinghua Experimental School

Foreign students experience the Chinese character culture experience park.

The creative design of the word "Suzhou" won the "Best Design" award in the 2023 "Word in My Heart" Chinese Character Creative Design Works event.

Recently, the 2023 "Words in My Heart" International Communication Seminar on Chinese Character Culture and an Exhibition of Excellent Chinese Character Creative Design Works were held in Beijing, co-sponsored by the World Chinese Teaching Society and the Beijing International Chinese Training Institute, and co-organized by the Capital Chinese Education Alliance. The "Words in My Heart" collection of Chinese character creative design works has been held for two consecutive years. Participants are overseas teenagers, Chinese teenagers, etc. A total of 1,874 works from 34 countries and regions were received. These works demonstrate the beauty of Chinese characters and the cultural information they carry through the creative design of Chinese characters.

Creative design works with Chinese characters show regional features and cultural connotations

The famous writer Wang Meng once said: "The amount of information Chinese characters give us is so rich. It is not only a work of art, but also expresses sounds, historical classics, and the wisdom and wisdom of those who can no longer speak. Feelings." This shows the important value of Chinese characters.

What is the beauty of the creatively designed Chinese characters on display this time? What kind of cultural connotation does it have? The review expert of this event, Chen Nan, a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts of Tsinghua University, gave comments on some of the award-winning works, giving the exhibition audience a "glimpse of the art."

The creative design of the word "Suzhou" was the "Best Design" selected in the 2023 "The Word is in My Heart" Chinese Character Creative Design Works Collection Activity. Chen Nan commented: "This work uses the strokes of Chinese characters to construct the beautiful scenery of the Jiangnan water town. The two points of the character 'Su' and the three points of the character 'zhou' are designed to look like unique windows in Suzhou gardens. The horizontal and vertical strokes It’s the roof and the pillars. From the overall composition, the left is high and the right is low. In addition, the overall design uses black and white, which well connects it with the impression of black tiles and white walls in the Jiangnan water town."

Regarding the creative design of the word "Guizhou" that won the Gold Star Award in this event, Chen Nan said that the design overall showed rich ink colors and childish brushstrokes, reconstructing the parts of the Chinese characters and the headdress of ethnic minorities, using bold and bold brushwork Powerful, "I appreciate this visual expression with strong vitality."

What won the Silver Star Award was the creative design of the words "Hui", "Jinjiang" and "Ningxia". Chen Nan told reporters that the design of "Emblem" is a visual reconstruction of several objects. Architecture, plants, dramas, etc. form the strokes of the Chinese character "Emblem". Huangmei Opera, welcoming pine and representative products express the designer's deep love for his hometown. The design of "Jinjiang" expresses the style characteristics of traditional Fujian houses, and the relationship between black and white and the composition of strokes are more ingenious; the design of "Ningxia" uses Ningxia's representative product landscape to form the strokes of the Chinese character "Ningxia". Although the design The techniques are relatively common, but the density relationship between strokes and the reconstruction of graphics and font strokes are more clever.

“I will continue to learn Chinese because of my curiosity and love for Chinese characters.”

“Chinese characters are like paintings, very interesting.” “There are many stories behind Chinese characters.” “Chinese characters are completely different from my native language.” This is the feeling of many overseas Chinese learners. It is their curiosity about Chinese characters that inspires them. Enter the world of Chinese characters. Among the outstanding works of Chinese character creative design exhibited this time, many were created by non-native Chinese speakers. Sa Yixin from Tajikistan is one of the creators.

The work "Snow" designed by Sa Yixin won the Star Award at this event. He is a seventh-grade student at Tianjin Yinghua Experimental School and has been studying Chinese for half a year. "This year's theme is 'Words Talk About Hometown'. It often snows in my hometown, so I wanted to create a word 'snow' that can express the beauty of my hometown, and integrate the snow, pine trees, mountains and other elements of my hometown into the design," Sa Yixin said. .

In Sa Yixin's opinion, Chinese characters are very interesting, and the glyphs are very curious, and they always want to find out. In addition, Chinese characters not only have profound historical and cultural heritage, but are also full of creativity. "When I design Chinese characters, I try to combine the traditional aesthetics of Chinese characters with modern design. I hope to show a novel, unique, and artistic design style that allows people to enjoy the beauty of Chinese characters and feel fun at the same time. For me "What's more important is that by participating in the competition, I have improved my design skills and learned more about the history of Chinese characters." Sa Yixin said that learning Chinese characters not only made him feel the charm and charm of Chinese characters, but also gained a deeper understanding of the profoundness of Chinese culture. gain a deeper understanding.

Another person who fell in love with Chinese culture because of Chinese characters is Lin Ruoling from Egypt. She is now a doctoral candidate at Beijing Language and Culture University. "It is precisely because of my curiosity and love for Chinese characters that I continue to learn Chinese. I really want to thank Hanzi." Lin Ruoling said.

Lin Ruoling's Chinese journey began when she was an undergraduate student in Egypt. At that time, she recognized few Chinese characters and basically stayed at the stage of recognizing simple Chinese characters such as one, two, big, and small. "In order to learn more Chinese characters, I thought of a way, that is, every time I learn a Chinese character, I write it on a large piece of paper, and then hang it on the wall of my room. In less than a month, my room is full of I got a piece of paper with Chinese characters written on it." Lin Ruoling still remembered that when a guest entered her room, "it felt like a maze, and only I knew how to decipher the maze."

Effective learning methods have allowed Lin Ruoling to go further. After she went to China to study for a master's degree, she gained a deeper understanding of Chinese characters and fell in love with Chinese culture. "It is precisely because I know Chinese characters that I can share what I see and hear in China with my friends. This is not just my feeling, but also the feeling of many overseas Chinese learners." Lin Ruoling said.

Teaching Chinese characters is both a focus and a difficulty in international Chinese education

Mastering Chinese characters gives you a key to understanding Chinese culture. This is the consensus of overseas Chinese learners, but they often lament that learning Chinese characters is not easy. In the eyes of overseas Chinese learners, the structure of Chinese characters is complex and there are many strokes. In addition, there are many characters with polyphonic meanings and similar sounds in Chinese characters. This makes the teaching of Chinese characters always one of the difficulties in international Chinese education. How to carry out Chinese character teaching so that overseas Chinese learners can quickly master Chinese characters and maintain interest?

At the 2023 "Words in My Heart" Symposium on the International Communication of Chinese Character Culture, Professor Xu Jingning from the School of Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language at Peking University introduced her teaching practice of zero-start Chinese classes for overseas students in this spring semester. In teaching, Xu Jinning adheres to the teaching principle of "separating reading and writing, recognizing more and writing less", requiring students to read Chinese characters and be accustomed to reading each Chinese character. However, students can choose the Chinese characters they want to write, and just write 6 to 10 characters per lesson. "After learning about 50 words in 3 lessons, students began to try to make up their own words. This conveyed a message that students have established a sense of awareness - every Chinese character is meaningful and can be combined into One word. This awareness is very important for future Chinese written language learning." Xu Jingning said.

According to Xu Jingning, the students in this class are older, and most of them come with the attitude of earning credits. But after one semester, they began to recognize that learning Chinese is easy and interesting, and they became more interested in learning Chinese. This shows to a certain extent that Chinese characters do not cause the problem of "difficulty learning Chinese". The key is to explore effective teaching methods.

Chinese character teaching is also a key teaching content of the Beijing International Chinese Language Training Institute, which has developed experiential Chinese character teaching materials for international Chinese education such as "Experiencing Chinese Characters in Architecture" and "Experiencing Chinese Characters in Farming". At the same time, based on experiential Chinese character teaching materials, a Chinese character resource application system based on artificial intelligence was created to provide students with an immersive learning environment and learning conditions for Chinese character teaching.

According to Gui Fan, director of the Beijing International Chinese Language Training Institute, the institute has been building a Chinese character culture experience park. Up to now, the experience park has completed 20 experience workshops, including a brief history of Chinese characters, the beauty of Chinese characters, the beauty of Chinese characters, the oracle bone inscription universe, coin rubbing literacy, skillful spelling of Chinese characters, audio-visual Chinese characters, idiom expert, movable type printing, etc. Data shows that since April 2023 to now, the experience park has received more than 1,000 foreign experiencers from 71 countries. It is worth mentioning that the experience park began to try to expand from semi-real scenes to the digital metaverse environment, and cooperated with relevant institutions to develop the metaverse version of Chinese Character Monopoly to create a real-time, spatial, and immersive Chinese Character Monopoly. , allowing visitors to experience a different kind of Chinese character culture.

(Except for signatures, all pictures accompanying this article are provided by Beijing International Chinese Language Training Institute.)