"Isn't dialogue just talking?" someone asked curiously.
Zhu Yanyi shook her head. "No, our dialogue is matching words. For example, if I say 'wind,' you say 'rain.' Both are weather. You can also say 'fog' or 'clouds.' But there is one rule: you must know how to write the word."
"But we haven't learned characters yet. We only know pinyin now," the children said. They wanted to play this game.
Zhu Yanyi giggled. "So today, we will quickly review all the pinyin."
She wrote all the pinyin on the blackboard. It took only two minutes. She wrote all the new and old pinyin. On the left side, she wrote the initial consonants. On the right side, she wrote the final vowels.
After finishing, Zhu Yanyi smiled. "These pinyin are actually in our books. But you only learned the first few. No one learned the later ones. These letters are just like English letters. There are twenty-six English letters, just like our pinyin. Do you want to learn them first?"
"Yes!" The students were interested. Pinyin was hard for them.
Zhu Yanyi laughed. "We will learn three every day. Usually, we can finish all letters in eight days. English is simple because their words are made by combining these twenty-six letters randomly. But our pinyin is different. Our pinyin is based on what we learn. It is a bit harder. But if you learn it well, you will find it simpler than English. There is no choice. We are Chinese. Learning Chinese characters is our best skill. Otherwise, if you learn English well but fail to learn Chinese characters, people will say you worship foreign things. Do you want to become fake foreigners?"
"No! That would be a traitor," Kang Li spoke first. In the children's hearts, fake foreigners were traitors.
Zhu Yanyi chuckled softly. "Kang Li’s words remind me of a story. It goes like this: In the early days of war, a student returned from studying abroad. We don’t know where she studied. But when she came back, she spoke broken foreign language. She greeted people with 'holle.' You know, people in our country dislike those who forget their roots.
One person stepped forward and said to the student: 'I see you saying "holle" every day. Do you have a throat problem? Why do you keep shouting "throat, throat"?'
The student replied: 'What do you know? "Holle" means hello. You people are too rustic. You don’t know this foreign language.'
The person said: 'Yes, we don’t know foreign language. But we know Chinese. Do you know how to write "forgetting your ancestors"? Do you know what "worshipping foreign things" means? Do you know that there are always better people outside the mountain? Do you know how crops grow in the field? Do you know where your food and clothes come from? You know nothing. Why shout "throat"? Our China has thousands of years of history. How many years of history does your "Throat Country" have? If you don’t even know your ancestors, what is the use of learning foreign language?'
Zhu Yanyi paused and looked at everyone. The students listened carefully. The classroom was silent.
Zhu Yanyi continued, "The student heard those words and broke out in cold sweat. She looked down on her fellow villagers for not knowing foreign language. But actually, she didn’t know deep Chinese history either. From then on, she started to seriously relearn Chinese history. She found that Chinese knowledge was much richer than the foreign language she had learned. Finally, she became a great writer. Do you know what this story tells us?"