By Xinhua writers Tian Ying, Bai Xu
BEIJING, April 20 (Xinhua) -- Late at night, scrolling through social media, many Chinese users are surprised to find a foreigner "teaching" them the origins of Chinese characters.
Dressed in a bright yellow cardigan and standing before a blackboard, the vlogger who goes by the name "Uncle Hanzi (Chinese characters)" breaks down the evolution of Chinese script over millennia, one character at a time.
His videos draw tens of thousands of views. In the comments, Chinese viewers express both admiration and amazement at this foreign teacher's deep understanding of their native language. Some cracked jokes that the way he looks resembles "Grandpa Kentucky Fried Chicken," emphasizing his relatable image.
The man behind the account is Richard Sears, an American who moved to China 15 years ago. Well known among Chinese language enthusiasts since his etymology website went viral in 2011, Sears, now in his seventies, has found renewed visibility, with social media giving his work a new lease on life. His Rednote account alone has over 230,000 followers.
His story feels especially timely around Guyu (Rain of Millet), the sixth of the 24 solar terms of the Chinese lunisolar calendar. The date of Guyu honors Cangjie, the legendary figure believed to have invented Chinese characters. Legend has it that when the characters were invented, "ghosts wept and millet rained from the sky."
Guyu typically begins around April 20 in the Gregorian calendar -- a date now recognized by the United Nations as UN Chinese Language Day. This year marks the 80th anniversary of the designation of Chinese as UN official language.
Despite his training in physics and computer science, Sears's life took an unexpected turn at the age of 22, when he became fascinated by Chinese and began learning it. At the time, he was struck by the fact that while roughly one-fifth of the world's population spoke Chinese, very few Americans were studying it. Moreover, unlike alphabet-based languages, Chinese characters felt both unique and intellectually challenging.
A character represents the most basic unit of meaning, and it is always a single syllable in length. The Chinese writing system is the oldest continuously used writing system in the world, and currently the only logographic one still in use worldwide, sinologist and literary translator Igor Radev explained the uniqueness of Chinese characters in an interview with Xinhua.
"Over several millennia, it has preserved its fundamental principles and structural integrity, despite changes in the shapes of individual characters," Radev said. A logographic writing system is one where characters represent entire words rather than individual sounds.
Learning Chinese characters was far from easy. Sears had not been able to read or write in Chinese until he began studying its etymology at about 40 and realized that each character follows its own logic. "Once you understand where a character comes from, everything starts to make sense," said Sears, explaining his motivation.
By understanding how characters evolved from pictographic origins, Sears found he could learn more efficiently while gaining insight into ancient Chinese life and culture.
He illustrated his point with the Chinese character for "god" -- "Shen," a left-right composition character. While the left part of the character signifies worship, the right component derives from the pictograph of lightning. Sears explained that before the advent of the lightning rod, a lightning strike represented awe-inspiring, godly power.
"When you have an abstract thing like the gods, you have to make a pictograph of something that represents the abstract idea," he concluded, citing another example of the character for "sickness" -- "Ji," a character evolved from a pictograph of a person hit by an arrow. "You can't draw a picture of sickness. You have to draw a picture of a person with an arrow in him that represents sickness," Sears further explained.
What began as curiosity soon turned into a lifelong pursuit. Drawing on his digital background, he launched the website hanziyuan.net (Chinese character origins) in 2002 to document the evolution of characters. For years, the site attracted little attention until 2011, when it took off with a Chinese netizen's voluntary promotion of the site on Weibo.
Today, it hosts over 100,000 ancient character forms, attracting viewers from around the globe. Users can explore the evolution of a character across oracle bone script, bronze inscriptions, seal script and later forms, along with pronunciations and classical explanations.
Looking back on his unexpected career change, Sears is pleased that his work is helping Mandarin learners around the world, as reflected in the positive feedback he has received. He believed that he persevered despite skepticism because he followed his own interests. At the beginning, computer experts he knew showed no interest in Chinese, while specialists in ancient Chinese insisted it could not be computerized.
"But if you have your own interests, then you don't have to worry very much about what other people think," Sears told Xinhua.
Across Chinese social media platforms, Sears is not alone in celebrating the appeal of Chinese script. Many foreigners express their curiosity about a writing system that is entirely different from their alphabetic ones.
A 25-year-old Swiss vlogger with over 20,000 followers on Rednote, who goes by the name "Gaisen," says the Chinese language is "super cool" for the visual logic of characters -- each character functions like a picture and often reveals its meaning through its components -- on the one hand; and the specific meaning embedded in Chinese names, on the other.
From a sinologist's view, Radev deemed, "Not only are Chinese characters not off-putting to prospective foreign learners, but, on the contrary, their sheer exoticism and cultural uniqueness often serve as a motivating factor for them to become interested in studying the Chinese language."
At a regular news briefing last week, Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun addressed the question regarding this year's UN Chinese Language Day, saying he's seen more and more foreign journalists asking questions in fluent, idiomatic Chinese at the foreign ministry's regular press briefings.
"We look forward to seeing more foreign friends learn Chinese, which will open for them the window on modern China and the Chinese civilization," Guo said. ■
