Chinese Language Day festivities at UN

When he began learning calligraphy, he rushed to write with brush and ink, but his teacher taught him to calm down and meditate for a while before starting to write, Dalhuijsen recalled.

With "peace in (the) heart," the characters can be written more beautifully, he said.

"I have learned much better to appreciate both the meaning and the etymology of the characters," Dalhuijsen said of the importance of writing Chinese in the correct stroke order.

The chosen date for the Chinese Language Day is related to a legend of Chinese characters, too.

Every year, the celebration is held roughly at the same time in April around guyu, which literally means "rain of millet," referring to the sixth of the 24 solar terms created by ancient Chinese to carry out agricultural activities. Chinese people celebrate the day in honor of Cang Jie, a mythical figure who is presumed to have invented Chinese characters about 5,000 years ago.

Legend has it that when Cang Jie created the characters, the deities and ghosts cried and it rained millets.

Nowadays, the Chinese language is the most spoken language around the world. More than 1 billion people speak it as their mother tongue, which means one person in six in the world communicates using Chinese.

Xinhua