Thousands of years ago, Chinese characters appeared on animal bones and silk before they     1     (write) on paper. But now many     2     character has a “new container” in the modern age. 

Recently, a research team, drawing every little bit of     3     (inspire) from Xunzi, an outstanding Confucian philosopher during the late Warring States Period (475-221 BC), has rolled out Xunzi, a large language model (LLM) and Xunzi Chat in association with a leading ancient Chinese text publisher. When     4     (ask) why, the team leader explained, “Characters  set invertical layout (竖版), the absence of pausing and punctuation are all holding readers back.”     5     (create) Xunzi the LLM, the team first did a lot of research. Since2013, they’ve sweated     6     (heavy) to digitize Chinese classics like the SikuQuanshu. “The hard work involves a large-scale pool of two billion Chinese characters,     7     has laid a solid foundation for the LLM.” Their efforts seem to have paid off. Currently, Xunzi the LLM can translate, punctuate     8     understand some ancient Chinese texts. The model can help us mine for more information hidden in our cultural legacy and find unnoticed models and connections.

The team have shared the LLM on GitHub and other websites,     9     (allow) users to download and use it for free. They’re committed to the philosophy of making the data and model     10     (access) globally.

In February 2022, I began learning Chinese with the     1     (intend) of enjoying Chinese culture. Almost a year later, I found myself in Beijing, the capital of China. Before coming here, I     2     (attend) Chinese classes, and I could sense my progress in the language. As     3     matter of fact, studying for just one year wasn’t enough to claim fluency. But full proficiency in the language is not necessary to lose     4     (you) in and enjoy many attractions of life in China.

The one thing that truly makes me feel comfortable is making friends and engaging     5     conversation. At Tsinghua University,     6     I pursued my studies in China, I made friends with many Chinese young people. I often     7     (invite) to have meals or leisure activities with them, such as going to KTV, which is a popular entertainment among Chinese youth. I felt that connecting with my Chinese peers through a shared passion, such as singing, was     8     (incredible) enjoyable and beautiful.

During breaks from study, I frequently travels across China. I’ve explored cities like Shanghai, Chongqing, and Changsha in Hunan province, among others. Though I have experienced traveling on overnight trains for over 12 hours several times and explored     9     (familiar) cities, I never felt fearful or unwelcome as a foreigner. Chinese people are warm and welcoming to foreigners, and eager     10     (offer) help.

6 . In July 1915, severely tortured by his poor health, James Murray, one of the early editors of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), defined one final word. After his 36 years’ dedication to the dictionary, his hard labour had taken a toll, knowing he would not see the project complete.

The poetic quality of Murray’s final days is one of the many memorable tales in The Dictionary People. Beginning in 1857, the OED was a huge crowdsourcing project - “the Wikipedia of the 19th century” - comprising 3, 000 people. The idea was to create a “descriptive” dictionary that tracked words’ use and meaning over time, unlike its “prescriptive”18th-century predecessor by Samuel Johnson, which told readers how to say and use words. Volunteers read widely, mailing in examples of how “rare, old-fashioned, new, strange” words were used. What is surprising about this fairly random method is that it worked.

The origin story of Sarah Ogilvie’s book is almost as improbable as that of the dictionary itself. Ms Ogilvie, a former scholar who served as an editor for the OED, went into the documents of Oxford University Press and came across an old notebook. It had belonged to Murray and contained the names and details of the dictionary volunteers, most of whom had previously been unknown. The Dictionary People is her work of detective scholarship, bringing the lives behind the names to readers.

Ms Ogilvie’s book is full of intriguing stories. The presentation of the book is unconventional, too, taking its structure from the work it describes. There are 26 alphabetical chapters, each celebrating a group of contributors ( memorably, “K” is for “kleptomaniac” people who desire to steal). This is a clever arrangement, though it sometimes means that broader issues emerge only in pieces.

Essentially, this is a story about ordinary people. It is concrete proof of those who, to cite dictionary-helper George Eliot, “lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs”.

Earlier this year, the Ugandan Ministry of Education introduced the Chinese language as a subject in secondary schools to some 60, 000 students and urged them     1     (acquire) the language in the next four years. Uganda is not alone in adding the Chinese language     2     the school curriculum. Other African countries, including Tanzania, South Africa and Cameroon, have already made the similar     3     (decide) .

Besides having six Confucius Institutes, South Africa has rolled out Chinese language courses at 45 primary and secondary schools. More and more young people in this country are     4     (gradual) turning to the language as a way of     5     (find) their dream jobs in China.

Chinese Ambassador to South Africa Lin Songtian said that Beijing had provided technical and financial support to improve Chinese language teaching in the country. “Over the past 16 years, China and South Africa     6     (conduct) all-round cooperation (合作) in such fields as inter-school exchanges, language teaching and academic research and achieved     7     (amaze) outcomes,” Lin said. Sept. 17 has been chosen as South African Chinese Language Day     8     is to be observed annually.

Angie Motshekga, South Africa’s minister for basic education, said that teaching the Chinese language has been at the heart of education and cultural exchanges between Pretoria and Beijing     9     that language is the key to promoting understanding and friendship between the two     10     (people).

9 . For adults, communicating in our first language feels easy and natural. Yet learning language is a complex process that is influenced by several factors. When young children are beginning to learn language, some influences, such as the amount of speech a child hears and the amount of time they spend in back-and-forth language interactions with others, have what may appear to be obvious connections to language learning. Perhaps less obvious is that children’s own physical experiences with their environment help them learn new words.

In new research in the cognitive sciences, we investigated how this is the case by considering how children learn words that refer to something they can touch, grasp and interact with. We asked parents to rate how easily a child can physically interact with the object, idea or experiences that a word refers to. We found words that refer to objects that are easy for children to interact with are also words that are learned at an earlier age.

For instance, a word such as spoon is usually learned earlier than a word such as sky. And this relationship remains even when we consider other things that can affect word learning, such as how common a word is in everyday language. Words such as spoon and sky are both relevant to everyday life, and so children will probably hear those words quite early in their development. One difference between them is that spoon refers to something they can touch, grasp and interact with, whereas sky does not.

Our findings agree with those of studies where babies wore small head-mounted body cameras to record their interactions with objects. Those studies show that the children’s own physical experiences helps them learn new words. For instance, in one study researchers found that 18-month-old babies were more likely to learn the name of a new object when they held that object, and less likely to learn the name if their parent held the new object. Another study found that 15-month-olds who spent more time using new objects had learned more nouns by the time they were 21 months old.