CISS Chinese Characters Course: Ancient Wisdom, Exquisite Art

In the eyes of westerners, Chinese characters represent mysterious ancient Oriental wisdom and exquisite Chinese art, while in the eyes of foreign students of Chinese origin; Chinese characters stand for cultural identity and recognition.

For westerners, Chinese characters are so numerous that they are difficult to learn and remember. For foreign students of Chinese origin, compared with oral expression, Chinese characters often are boring and complicated. Although we write and use Chinese characters every day, we never jump out of the box objectively and examine what Chinese characters are and how they come from. CISS Chinese character course starts from the generation, shape evolution, formation and the structure of Chinese characters, so that students can understand Chinese characters from different perceptual and rational perspectives, understand the formation process of Chinese characters, and feel the wisdom of ancestors.

The generation of Chinese characters: In the ancient times when there were no characters, people used to record events by knots, objects, carvings and drawings. With the development of human society, characters emerged at the due course. As an ideographic system, Chinese characters evolved from glyphs. Through the "I guess what you draw" game, students experience the ancient way of keeping records!

The shape evolution of Chinese characters: After the evolution of Chinese characters, the physical form has undergone great changes. From the oracle bone scripts and inscriptions on ancient bronze objects  to seal script, official script, cursive script, regular script and running script, different characters also have different shape characteristics and artistic beauty. Let's travel back a thousand years together, and write a sentence with oracle bone script!

Formation of character: pictographic, self-explanatory, associative compound and pictophonetic are the four main methods of word formation. The method of character formation gives Chinese characters a constant vitality, and people still use the ancient mechanism to invent new characters today .Be a contemporary Cang Jie ( the inventor of Chinese characters in legand )  and create your own Chinese characters!

Structure of Chinese characters: strokes constitute parts, parts constitute Chinese characters. Basic parts are arranged and combined to form different Chinese characters. Here are the maze of parts. See how many exits can you find?

Understanding the historical origin, evolution and formation mechanism of Chinese characters can effectively help students get rid of rote memorization and make Chinese learning more reasonable and interesting.