Jay Chou

---

We practiced writing the Chinese characters in class today. While we had all been practicing on our own, writing the characters over and over, it was not until we had to write sentences up on the board were we able to see how mis-shapen our Chinese handwriting was. We spent the whole class just laughing at each other's pictures as our teacher went through and critiqued our sentences. One of the funny things about this exercise was that if you "mis-spelled" a character, in other words forgot a stroke or two, it could have some completely different, unintended meaning. Overall I think what we wrote on the board looked more like Egyptian hieroglyphics than the beautiful Chinese "pictures".

A central theme to the Chinese writing system is that each character must be balanced, so each stroke is carefully placed. If we put a stroke too high or too low our teacher would tell us that the character was ugly! Most words in the language are made up of a combination of characters, so sometimes it helps to break down a word's character into its combined characters to help you remember the character and its meaning. One interesting word was "family", whose character was a combination of the character for "room" placed over the character for "pig". Quite fitting 😊

Besides class, I have also been getting up to date with Chinese pop music today. The hot pop artist in China seems to be Jay Chou, a Taiwanese singer and instrumentalist. He is classified as a rap and hip-hop artist, but his music has such diversity between songs that I think this classification is too confining. Many of his songs incorporate piano, violins, cellos, and various other instruments to make it more of a classical sound. I really enjoy his music, it is very different from pop music that is currently being played in the states. My goal is to bring Jay Chou to the western world, I think his music would be well received in the pop culture scene. I am not sure why his music has not made it to the United States, as other foreign songs in languages other than English have been popular in the U.S. before. I encourage you to sample some of his music if you have the chance. There are actually websites which have the lyrics in pinyin, characters, and English so this way I can sing along and be studying at the same time 😉

---

Comments

[Carla]

Chinese singing!
Can't wait to hear you sing in Chinese!