History of "Longing of My Hometown in the Midnight" Poem

Series Summary

The Chinese language has produced many poets studied all over the world, including Lau Tzu and Confucious. Thousands of poems from these authors remain, and their aesthetic and cultural value is unparalleled. Chinese is written mostly in logograms, characters that have structural and semantic meaning in the language, as well as pictograms, characters that look like the object that they refer to.

In these simple demonstrations, Xiaohua shows you how to write and speak in Chinese, starting with individual words like pinetree, under, ask, little kids, say, and teacher. She helps you string the words together as well, recreating the lines of a beautiful poem. This series is a great introduction to writing and speaking Chinese. Time well spent!

Video Transcript

"ESTHER-XIAOHUA LIU: This is a poem from Tang Dynasty even though Tang Dynasty is about more 1000 years ago, much more than that, but 1,500 years ago. But from this poem, we can see that those words used in this poem are as simple as the words we are using now, every day. So it is really good for us to learn these words from this poem. And in China, even those little kids, they start to recite these ancient poems at age about 3, 4, or even younger, because these poems, since they use the exactly the same number of words in each line, so it makes very good rhythms, and that music as we read in the previous poem, it's like [SPEAKING IN CHINESE]. So sounds really beautiful."