One fundamental principle of the design of these practice sheets is based on the trussing structure of Chinese characters (間架結構 jiānjià jiégòu), a concept introduced to children at a very early stage. The choice of a specific type of grid is not made unreasonably. Is this result arbitrary? Not necessarily. Each of them is sorted by “best-selling.” While the first two types sold more than 10,000 in the past month, the other three each had around 1,000 purchases.) (figure 5: from left to right are the search results for tiánzìgé, mǐzìgé, jǐngzìgé, huízìgé, and jiǔgōnggé. The sales of tiánzìgé and mǐzìgé are much greater than other types. Below is a screenshot from taobao, the largest online shopping platform (see figure 5). Here is a simple way for us to see the popularity of each very straightforwardly. (figure 4: from left to right are jǐngzìgé, huízìgé, and jiǔgōnggé) There are other types of practice sheets, including but not limited to, 井字格 jǐngzìgé, 回字格 huízìgé, or 九宮格 jiǔgōnggé, but these are far less popular (see figure 4). In this way, they are trained to unify the size of characters.) Into each square, the student puts one character, regardless of whether it is a simple or a complicated one. (figure 3: left is a practice sheet with tiánzìgé and right is one with mǐzìgé. With rows and lines of these gridded squares, certain types of writing sheets are distributed to students (figure 3). (figure 2: left is a tiánzìgé and right is a mǐzìgé) Therefore, most children in China are introduced to certain kinds of calligraphy-practice sheets with grids to assist them in practicing writing the characters among them, the Tian-shaped grid 田字格 tiánzìgé and the Mi-shaped grid 米字格 mǐzìgé are the most common two to be used (see figure 2). How can you write them in the same size, which has to be not so big in the first place?) (figure 1: from left to right: biáng in traditional Chinese with 56 strokes, biáng in simplified Chinese with 42 strokes, and yī with only one stroke. Not to mention, there are characters less common but with way more strokes, such as 麤 cū, with thirty-three strokes, 龘 dá/tà, with fifty-one strokes, and the most famous one biáng (as in figure 1) with forty-two or fifty-six strokes. But this can be a challenging task in reality, in regards to how different the Chinese characters can be to each other with the number of strokes ranging from as simple as characters with one stroke only (for instance, 一 yī and 丨gǔn ) to complex ones with up to twenty-eight strokes (矗 chù, the character with most strokes among the 3,500 common used Chinese characters). This is not a unique case that only exists in Chinese. One thing essential for every elementary-level Chinese learner is to learn to write the characters in the same size in one single passage. Calligraphy Practicing Sheets and the Trussing Structure of Chinese Characters
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