Lizhong Zhang

Chinese Three Character Poems Lizhong Zhang

Chinese-Three-Character Classic is a Chinese language textbook, being age-old, widely read, and influential. With a vocabulary of about 1000 Chinese characters and 400 lines, this textbook covers many aspects of knowledge such as ethics, history and learning, and its thus rich in content and succinct in style. From a pedagogical point of view, because its text features rhythm, Chinese-Three-Character Classic can help learners to memorize and read Chinese characters. However, as it was written centuries ago, its classical style of writing and expression is difficult for students to understand today. Therefore, following the same form of the textbook, we have attempted to use new content in writing this Chinese Three-Character Poems. This new text is intended to be simple in vocabulary, easy to understand, and good for reading aloud, with the content reflecting both the characteristics of Chinese culture and the spirit of the modern era. To meet the various needs of Chinese language learners, the new book uses comparisons of the classical and simplified characters, and the two phonetic schemes, zhuyin and pinyin, plus with English translation throughout. At the end of the book, a table of vocabulary with English explanations and pinyin notations and the original Three-Character Classic are included for the reader's reference. In order to enhance the reader's understanding of the text, we have invited Mr. He Zhuyuan to create a large number of illustrations for the book.