Broadcasters get behind push to revive writing Chinese by hand

Has it ever occurred to you that you can type out a complete article neatly on the computer but run into various spelling difficulties whey you try to write the words on paper? Native Chinese speakers also find themselves in this kind of quandary. It is common for people to use certain words every day but when required to write them on paper, they can only manage a general impression of the character.

Hard to believe? Ask your Chinese friends to try the words Weiyu Choumou written as 未雨绸缪. The four Chinese characters mean "preparing in advance," but people often go blank on the last two. Here's another one: Da Han, written as 打鼾. The two characters mean "to snore," but hardly anyone remembers how to write Han.

"Among all the various characters that people are using today, Chinese [writing system] is the only ideographic genre that contains rich cultural intension and aesthetic value," said Guan Zhengwen, director of the upcoming program Chinese Character Dictation Contest on CCTV-10.

"Meanwhile, Chinese characters are also the most difficult to write, requiring consistent handwriting practice to  memorize," Guan emphasized, "but now we are relying too much on keyboards to input words, which gradually lowers our ability to write Chinese characters correctly."

Spending years under the teacher's watchful eye combining radicals with various phonetics or entirely unique combinations of strokes to constitute a vocabulary of over 80,000 makes the memory of learning to write Chinese characters one of the most painful for nearly anyone who spent time in a Chinese elementary school. And to determine how well the students had mastered the words, teachers administered dictation exams.

Now, to raise people's awareness of the importance of handwriting skills for Chinese characters, CCTV's dictation contest recreates the familiar classroom scene on stage.

"It will not be an entertainment show with dazzling visual effects. It is just a simple and direct learning environment in which students compete in their writing skills," Guan told the Global Times.

Chase your dream

Scheduled for its first broadcast on August 2 this summer, the weekly program will choose contestants aged around 15 (usually the 2nd year of the middle school for a student) from all over the country. Each episode will last 90 minutes with the final win going to the best contestant after 12 rounds.

Despite the amount of culture they imbue, Chinese characters have rarely been emphasized in a contest format on a national scale. Whereas in the US, the National Spelling Bee is a contest now celebrating its 88th birthday since being established in 1925.

Each year when it comes to the finals of the contest, which are broadcast live by ABC (American Broadcasting Company), viewership can reach 400 million people across the globe.

And the drama related to such contests has become popular subject matter for Hollywood films like the Bee Season in 2005 and Akeelah and the Bee in 2006. There's even a Broadway musical - The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee - that has been running in New York City since its Tony-winning opening in 2005.

"For a country of immigrants, the National Spelling Bee partly functions like a cultural platform for all students to realize their American Dream," said Guan, "And for our country where 56 ethnic groups reside, we want this national contest of Chinese characters, which is a core part of Chinese culture, to also become a platform for all Chinese school-aged children to realize their Chinese dreams."

And to enable more students of ethnic minorities, or from poor and remote areas to take part in the contest, the age limit of 15 will be relatively loosened for them, according to Guan.

Making it interesting

Different from the National Spelling Bee, only the finals of which are broadcast on TV each year, the Chinese Character Dictation Contest has chosen to show each round on the program.

"To make the contest more suitable for being shown as a television program, we have spent the last two years studying its viabilities," said Jin Yue, production supervisor of CCTV-10. "Not just those contestants on stage, but people watching on television can also simultaneously participate in the contest, learning Chinese characters and feeling their beauty in an intense competition," said Jin.

And in reference to the beauty of Chinese characters, the program has been designed to include Chinese language and cultural experts like Yi Zhongtian that will sit offstage explaining the cultural origins of the words as the dictation examiner reads them to the on-stage contestants.

To guarantee the authoritativeness of the contest, all of the characters are selected and examined by senior editors of the Modern Chinese Language Dictionary, the most prestigious dictionary of the Chinese language. Meanwhile, to ensure a clear and standard pronunciation of Chinese words, anchors of CCTV-1's News Broadcast (or Xinwen Lianbo) including Li Ruiying and Kang Hui will dictate to the contestants.

Sense of urgency

"We now have more than 400,000 different types of Chinese books in the market, and the number of those that are substandard in terms of wording is alarming," said Huang Anjing, managing director of Excessive Wording, or Yaowen Jiaozi, a monthly magazine dedicated to promoting the standard use of Chinese languages.

At the same time, Huang pointed out, our education system now has the tendency to overlook language education. "During weekends or holidays, children are struggling to learn more about English or math, and as for Chinese language, most people think it's fine as long as children can communicate normally," said Huang.

Perhaps due to the fact that educators are increasingly realizing the urgent need to emphasize training in handwriting, the Chinese Character Dictation Contest is not the only such program that will hit TV screens this summer.

In early May, Henan TV and iqiyi.com announced that they will jointly make a program to be broadcast in July featuring young contestants called Chinese Character Hero.

Unlike the serious examination style of CCTV's program, the Henan TV version is more relaxed and is played like a game show. The show will feature family participation and netizens will also be able to take part by voting and commenting online.