chu yu ni er bu ran

I think this lesson has by far been the most interesting for me. It was interesting learning about the different ways peoples of different cultures write.

I think it is quite true that people of the Orient mainly write in a roundabout way and the passage that we studied in Activity 2 really brought that out. But I realised that how one views and analyses a passage written in Chinese against the same passage translated to English can be rather different.

Whilst reading Text B (from Activity 2), I remember thinking to myself that the author seemed to be talking nonsense because he was talking about flowers and people in different dynasties, and there seemed to be no link between the two subjects at all. But I do recall that after reading it a few more times I was beginning to suspect that the author wasn't actually talking about.. flowers.

It started off with the sentence "I favor the lotus because it grows out of mud, but is not stained by mud..." I realised that pretty much was a directly translation of the chinese idiom "chu yu ni er bu ran". (I attempted to type that out in Chinese, but I must admit that my Chinese isn't too good)

And it led me to think, that perhaps if I had read Text B in chinese I would have understood the message the writer was trying to convey immediately. Chinese idioms almost always serve as an imagery. It borrows pictures and scenes from life and shows that what we see in nature very often can be used to describe life for the human being. And I think that's the beauty of the Chinese language - that it always leaves room for thought, as we clearly established during lesson.