What Chinese texts or sentences are worth memorizing?

[rezaf]

<div>

And so I feel like memorization of long texts does not have a place in modern society, in other words, it is a waste of time.

</div>

By the same logic walking and doing physical work also doesn't have any place in the modern society because we have all kinds of machines and there is no longer any need to go hunting or working our ass off on a farm. This is probably how people used to think once upon a time when they had just got introduced to the modern technology but as a result of not doing those things people got very fat and all kinds of diseases like diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, cancer,... started to show up everywhere and now we have to spend lots of money and time every year at gyms and build machines to simulate the old physical work era for us.

I think your understanding of memorization doesn't see it as a part of a whole and therefore fails to see its full benefits.

[tooironic]

I think some basic Tang dynasty poems (唐诗) are worth 背ing - 静夜思, 黄鹤楼送孟浩源之广陵, 登鹳雀楼, etc. They're fun, relatively short, and contain some useful vocab too. You can find videos on Youtube/Youku to help you memorise them, and explanations of the meaning of the poems are all over the web.

[edelweis]

@tooironic: at what Chinese level do you think such poems can be useful/understandable?

[tooironic]

@edelweis With a good tutor/teacher these can be good to 背 at the intermediate or above level I reckon. Or you can learn them from a book or online, but it might not be as fun. ^^

[bunny87]

i absolutely loved studying classical chinese. i did this after completed the US designated "intermediate" level. - which, in Wuhan, still leaves me at an intermediate level. I used the text "An Introduction to Literary Chinese" by Fuller to study it. I was not only able to then pinyin and recite the selected readings, but understand the meaning and the grammar used.

Additionally, I was forced to do karaoke in chinese. which, i don't sing. so i struggled to memorize 2 or 3 Chinese songs (slow ones). for example 第一次爱的人。i'm 90+% sure that song is in English too. but then i was able to use the lyric grammar in speech, and got away with sounding amazing/natural. not sure about you all, but we practically memorized some song that went “kan guo laiii kan guo lai” 看过来

seeing as how i was bad with prepositions at the time, i enjoyed the written text. but hated the song as it was played WAAAAY too many times.

[rezaf]

Let's start a grand poetry memorization/recitation project. However memorizing 300 poems is not very realistic as most of us are really busy so perhaps we can choose 10~15 more interesting poems and memorize one every week. What do you think?

[OneEye]

I think that sounds great. I nominate the first poem (關雎) from the 詩經. I believe it's reasonably famous, being the first poem in the oldest extant collection of Chinese poetry. I'd imagine the bulk of the poetry will probably be from the Tang and Song Dynasties though.

[rezaf]

Good, I also want to nominate 月下獨酌 by 李白 as the second poem. I like it as it gives you a very clear picture of Libai's imagination and has the essence of poetry. I think we can start the project soon. Any more suggestions?

[xiaocai]

Shouldn't we start from simpler ones, stuff like 静夜思 or 赋得古原草送别? 诗经 is way too hard even for most native speakers...

[rezaf]

You have a good point. Probably it's better to start with easier poems and gradually raise the difficulty but as this project is mainly for intermediate and advanced learners I want the poems to be a little bit challenging, so too easy is also not good.