【推荐1】We can achieve knowledge either actively or passively. We achieve it actively by direct experience, by testing and proving an idea, or by reasoning.

We achieve knowledge passively by being told by someone else. Most of the learning that takes place in the classroom and the kind that happens when we watch TV or read newspapers or magazines is passive. Conditioned as we are to passive learning, it's not surprising that we depend on it in our everyday communication with friends and co-workers.

Unfortunately, passive learning has a serious problem. It makes us tend to accept what we are told even when it is little more than hearsay (传间) and rumor.

Did you ever play the game Rumor? It begins when one person writes down a message but doesn't show it to anyone. Then the person whispers it, word for word, to another person. That person, in turn, whispers it to still another, and so on, through all the people playing the game. The last person writes down the message word for word as he or she hears it. Then the two written statements are compared. Typically, the original message has changed.

That's what happens in daily life. The simple fact that people repeat a story in their own words changes the story. Then, too, most people listen imperfectly. And many enjoy adding their own creative touch to a story, trying to improve on it, stamping it with their own personal style. Yet those who hear it think they know.

This process is also found among scholars and authors: a statement of opinions by one writer may be restated as the fact by another, who may in turn be quoted by yet another; and this process may continue, unless it occurs to someone to question the facts on which the original writer based his opinion or to challenge the interpretation he placed upon those facts.

【推荐3】People often have the impression that Chinese characters are extremely difficult to learn. In fact, if you were to try to learn how to write Chinese characters, you would find that they are not nearly as difficult as you may have imagined. And they certainly qualify as forming one of the most attractive, beautiful, logical, and scientifically constructed writing systems in the world. Each stroke (笔画) has its own special significance. If you are familiar with the rules of Chinese characters, you will find it very easy to remember even the most complicated looking character, and never miss a stroke.

The earliest known examples of Chinese written characters in their developed form are carved into tortoise shells and ox bones. Most of these characters are pictographs. Archaeologists of various countries have learned that most early writing systems went through a pictographic stage, as did the Egyptian hieroglyphics. Most writing systems, however, eventually developed a phonetic (语音的) alphabet to represent the sounds of spoken language rather than visual images observed in the physical world.

One notable feature of Chinese characters is the “radical”. “Radical” in English means “root”. For example, the characters yu “language”, shuo “talk”, and lun “discuss” all share the yan radical, which means “language,” and gives the reader a clue to the meaning of the character as a whole. The characters xiu “rotten”, shan “cedar”, tao “peach” and lin “forest” , all contain the mu “wood” or “tree” radical, indicating one of their shared key characteristics. If you know the radical of a character, you can usually get a general idea of the meaning of the character. Although there is a theoretical total of almost 50,000 written Chinese characters, only about 5,000 of these are frequently used; and the total number of radicals is only 214. So learning to read and write Chinese is not nearly so difficult a task as it may at first seem.