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Comment by est | Hacker News Reader

> Every literate person not only in China but elsewhere in the Sinic reading world would have memorized this as a child

Nah, 千字文 is mainly used for practice calligraphy, are you thinking of Three Character Classic (三字经) ?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Character_Classic

Supposedly the QianZiJing was also widely memorised. The SanZiJing is a MUCH later text (probably half a millenium, give or take). That said, the SanZiJing is a much more pedagogical and all-round meaningful text. More value can be derived memorising it, as it is essentially a pre-Syllabus for a classical education, not only laying out basic principles, a set of texts for the student to learn, but also featuring an array of keywords that a curious student with access to a good teacher or extensive library can follow up on, all contained in an easy to memorise summary. QianZiJing by comparison is a fun and interesting literary curiosity.

I would, however, add that traditional Chinese character learning involved the complete memorisation of a text, followed by learning the characters associated with each word of that text. Learning individual characters in the way we think of as "traditional" today is actually a modern innovation compared to how people used to do it. In that context, memorising a text that consists of 1000 purely unique characters takes on a different character, even though I would think people would be better served just memorising more useful texts.

The thousand character classic was also used to teach the reading of chinese characters in Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese, though perhaps to a lesser extent than the three character classic. I have no idea to what extent this is true today, but it certainly held up until the 19th century.

Yes, 千字文 is not common in mainland China at all. I was born and raised in mainland China, and have no memory of the content of 千字文 other than the title.

三字经 on the contrary, is ubiquitous. I am guessing everyone heard of the first 2 terms of 三字经: 人之初性本善, meaning "the human nature is good"

This can be seen as a foundational psychology imprint of relatively dossile personality on every Chinese.

Nowadays, I always get a vibe of Dune when reading Chinese ancient classics. What a monumental accumulation of human cultivation in those classics!

Despite communism transformation, China actually get back to its traditional way of thinking and dealing with the outsiders around the world.

Or a different interpretation: the conventional mandate of heaven returned, but with a communism decoration.

> Yes, 千字文 is not common in mainland China at all. I was born and raised in mainland China, and have no memory of the content of 千字文 other than the title.

But the original content is talking about the past, not the modern era.

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