Tag: Vocabulary

Chinese literature: Chinese Poetic Literature

Chinese Poetry Literature is conventionally divided into four classes: poetry, ci , ge or songs, fu. Poetry proper has three forms. The first is " lü shi" or code verse which must contain two or more of what we call parallel couples. Thousands upon thousands of such endless double-filed processions march down the history of Chinese literature. In addition to parallelism in content there is also a phonetic parallelism or a parallelism of tones. The classical language of the Chinese poets is rhythmical almost to an excess, though not inherently musical. Prosody is based on changes in pitch as well as in accent. In a parallel couplet not only must the content, the parts of speech, the mythological and historico-geographical allusions, be all separately matched and balanced, but most of the tones must also be paired reciprocally. Even tones are conjoined with inflected ones, and vice versa. In general it can be said that the earlier code verse writers did not consider such a rigid pattern a formal necessity. It became more and more fossilized in the later literary examinations.

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Chinese travel

Now, I learned Chinese in Beijing City, that means I learned my Chinese(汉语hànyǔ) with all the R’s, my first time hearing Chinese was in Beijing(北京Běijīng) and I kinda thought it sounded like a bunch of dogs barking. Ruf ruf ruf ruf ruf. But hey that’s how I started Chinese, so in 2009 when I came to Yangshuo to start teaching, and to learn Chinese, I wasn’t even remotely used to their Chinese. None of the R’s I fell in love with, or for that matter really good Mandarin. At that time hearing the difference between Northern Mandarin and Southern Mandarin was like hearing a true New Yorker speaking his form of English, and hearing someone from the deep deep South in a swamp in the middle of nowhere’s English.

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