Since its establishment in 2014, the Chinese major at Thomas More University of Applied Sciences in Belgium has been dedicated to promoting the study of the Chinese language and culture within the country. Recognising the distinct challenges faced by Belgian students due to differences in nationality, culture, grammar, and native language, this paper conducts a comprehensive analysis of the difficulties in learning Chinese, a language fundamentally different from phonetic-based languages, with a particular emphasis on the complexities of Chinese character study. Based on a questionnaire survey of 105 Belgian students, the author has developed a set of tiered teaching methods that cater to different literacy levels and address the specific needs of students at various learning stages. These innovative methods, tailored to the learning characteristics of Belgian students, not only offer a roadmap for overcoming challenges in writing, recognising, understanding, and memorising Chinese characters but also serve as valuable references for Chinese language educators worldwide.

The teaching of oracle bone inscriptions has always been the central topic of ancient writing teaching. In order to improve the dissemination of oracle bone characters and teaching effects, this article attempts for the first time to develop test materials for oracle bone teaching experiments with a background of the current actual situation of ancient writing teaching. The teaching experiment materials for oracle script learners designed in this study include three parts: (1) background questionnaire; (2) oracle script pre-test and post-test materials; and (3) oracle script learning cards. Using the paradigm of ‘pre-test–study–post-test’, the oracle bone inscription teaching experiment was conducted step by step. Among them, the group with study cards and without study cards both made significant progress, and the improvement of the group with study cards was obviously higher than that of the group without study cards, which indicated that the study of oracle script cards is an effective way of learning. In addition, the oracle bone inscription cards are useful for the learning of ancient characters. After subjects learn the oracle bone character cards, they can transfer the knowledge of related oracle bone inscriptions to new oracle bone inscriptions that they have not learned.

This article examines the features found in the configurations of Gukja characters used for personal names recorded in Hanguk-hanja-jajeon ( 韓 國 漢 字 字 典 ). For the examination, a quantitative analysis was conducted from the aspect of combination patterns and direct components or pianpang ( 偏 旁 ). All characters used for Gukja personal names for this study are constructed using phono-semantic compounds among the principles of Chinese character formation. On this basis, the analysis was conducted with focus on two aspects: one is the position of semantic components ( 義 符 ) and phonetic components ( 音 符 ) within the six combination patterns; and the other is the count, types, and functional features of the semantic and phonetic components used in Gukja characters for personal names. These analyses revealed distinctive characteristics demonstrated in the configurations of Gukja characters for personal names, along with the uniqueness and cultural implications observed in Sino-Korean personal names in pre-modern Korea.

Preschool teachers’ pedagogical cognition and instructional support of emergent writing significantly shape the development of children's emergent writing abilities. In the linguistically complex border regions of China, where 3–6-year-old children often lack familial cultural capital, preschool teachers’ emergent writing cognition and instructional support play an even more critical role in shaping children's emergent writing abilities development. This study examined children's emergent writing abilities and teachers’ emergent writing cognition and instructional support through standardized assessments and questionnaires, involving 250 children (aged 3–6 years) from 55 classrooms and 110 preschool teachers in China's border regions. The study identified three distinct profiles of preschool teachers’ emergent writing cognition and instructional support: (1) cognitively underdeveloped class; (2) cognition-preceded support class; and (3) moderately balanced class. Children's emergent writing abilities showed significant positive correlations with both teachers’ emergent writing cognition and instructional support. Notably, the association between preschool teachers’ emergent writing cognition and children's emergent writing outcomes was stronger than that between emergent writing support and children's emergent writing. Preschool teachers in China's border regions should establish scientifically grounded conceptions of emergent writing, increase research-based instructional support, and effectively translate pedagogical knowledge into supportive behaviors to achieve cognition–support alignment, thereby promoting children's emergent writing abilities.

Scripts not only describe reality, but also reflect the social stratification, identity, and even power distribution among those who use them. These are often embedded in the creation myths told about writing systems. Concerning the famous pictographic script of the Naxi people, there are two distinct accounts of its invention. One is a myth spread orally in Baidi, the sacred land of the Naxi people, which tells that the script was created by a Tibetan-trained Naxi who became an ancestor of the Dongba, the Naxi religious specialists who use the script. The other is a record in the Genealogical Chronicles of the Mu Family, written in Chinese, which states that it was invented by an ancestor of the Naxi ruling chiefs in Lijiang named Maicong. These two sources thus clearly give very different accounts of the geographic origin of the script. In addition, the oral myth and the written genealogies attribute the creation of the script to persons with very different social backgrounds. This raises the question: how did these two sources’ completely different accounts of the same script come about? And how can we understand these two narratives? By examining these sources from anthropological and historical perspectives, this study analyzes the social conditions under which the two narratives were created, and discusses the roles played by creation myths of the Naxi script in social stratification, identity, and power distribution in Naxi society.

This introductory article to the volume deals with the historical development of an international Naxi Studies, and offers a review of the current situation of the discipline. Naxiology (the composition, provenance, and translation of Naxi manuscripts) is presented as a sub-discipline of Naxi Studies, and some recent landmark publications are introduced, alongside a discussion of the long-standing issue of Romanising the Naxi language. The interdisciplinary focus of this volume, dongba culture, is defended as a major component of Naxi studies around which all the individual contributions revolve.

This study focuses on Chinese characters with the radical “ zou 走,” positing that specific semantic features among zou’s semantic features play a central role in their core meanings. The objective is to elucidate the core semantic features observed within the group of characters incorporating zou as a radical. According to the findings, characters with the zou radical can primarily be categorized into two semantic fields: “motion” and “movement,” with a total of 17 related semantic items identified. These generated semantic items appear to differentiate each meaning item due to factors of focus, akin to creating a new lexicon. The core semantic features were derived as [ + Motion][ + Action][+Tool (feet)]. Thus, it is discernible that characters with the zou radical are all related to actions involving feet, indicating motion.

A determinative, also known as a “classifier,” is an ideogram utilized within a phonogram-ideogram compound, a common feature in ideographic-phonographic writing systems. It functions as a semantic indicator for the hosting word. Both ancient Egyptian and Chinese scripts extensively employed metonymic determinatives, which indicate the meaning of their hosting words in a metonymic manner. This article compares the use of metonymic determinatives in these two scripts and summarizes five underlying metonymic models through the analysis of numerous examples. Additionally, the cultural influences affecting the selection of metonymic determinatives are explored.

In the last two decades, we have extensively explored the semantic classifiers in ancient Egyptian scripts, showing how they encode the world from two complementary perspectives: universal cognitive tendencies of classification along with Egyptian society's categorization of the world. Our central hypothesis is that each graphemic classifier in the Egyptian writing system heads a conceptual category. The assemblage of words classified by a particular classifier presents us with a dynamic map of an emic category in the mind of a culture. Classifiers in the Egyptian script allow us to trace central and marginal members of conceptual categories, spot interrelations and overlaps between categories, observe diachronic developments and changes, and discover incompatibility of categories. The number of classifier occurrences in complex script systems amounts to millions (i.e., big data). In the last decade, we developed in the ArchaeoMind Lab the digital tool iClassifier 1 (© Goldwasser, Harel, and Nikolaev) designed to check our hypothesis on a large scope of texts from different periods and different scripts. We mark classifiers in imported digitalized corpora—in ancient Chinese, ancient Egyptian, and Sumerian cuneiform. This contribution introduces the reader to the rules of the classifier system in the Egyptian script and presents new results from a pilot project on a genuine Egyptian corpus (variants of the Story of Sinuhe ).

The phrase “toubo (投博)” in “toubozhiming (投博至明)” was the abbreviation of “touhu 投壶” and “boxi 博戏” in the bronze mirror inscriptions. In the Han Dynasty, “touhu (投壶)” and “boxi (博戏),” as two kinds of entertainment activities, usually appeared in the banquet scene simultaneously. As two dynamic and static activities, they were both physical and intellectual competitions, which were able to satisfy people's spiritual and cultural requirements. “Toubo (投博)” was understood as the abbreviation of “touhu (投壶)” and “boxi (博戏)”; it not only showed the rich variety of entertainment activities in the Han Dynasty, but also truly restored the scene of “toubozhiming (投博至明)” in the bronze mirror inscriptions.