Abigail Collier - Senior Project

10/13

Well it's been a busy week. I went to China for ten days and got a lot of research done. I didn't realize I wouldn't be able to connect to email and blogging so that's the reason this is so late. I scouted as many book stores in Beijing as I could, and found more than just ideas. I have decided to slightly change the product of my project, but keep everything else the same. Being in China, and talking to several people inspired a new idea. My goal was to teach chinese to children by comparing pictures with characters, and I found that this would be less effective through a book as I wouldn't be able to include as many characters as I want. My new idea is to design flash cards. The cards will include actual digital pictures of meanings, with their characters over them. This will give me the ability to cover more characters, and show exactly how they depict their meanings. For example; the character for mouth is a square, I will take a picture of someone's face and in red put the character over their mouth. The idea is that whenever a certain character is seen, the meaning will immediately follow. I found a million character books while in China and once I have finished with my set of characters I want to use, I can start taking the pictures. My next few goals will be mainly catching up on work done at school while I was gone. This week I will find an outside mentor (already started working on that,) and find all the characters I want to use. 

9/25

Well this week I finally got a chance to put all of my brainstorming in my book. This way I could finally see everything spread out and begin to map out my final project. I met with my mentor, Anna Zhao, and we decided that whether my audience is old or young I would still need a list of radicals. My next step is to sort through the radicals and find a good list of the ones i want to use (as there are almost 300 radicals.) Once i sort out the radicals, i will begin to decide on my age group.

9/20

Well my finished project is not set in stone quite yet. My original idea was to create a chinese children's book; the audience being american children about the age of eight. After doing more research and sitting in on an Oberlin College elementary chinese course, I am tempted to focus on an older audience. This not only is this more intellectually stimulating for me (as it gives me the freedom to cover more complicated ideas,) but I won't have to rely on illustration as that is not my strong point. Whether I pick a younger age group or not, my goal is still to give a well-rounded taste of the chinese language. I want to shine light on the fact that chinese characters were originally pictures, and although they seem random they do in fact look like their meaning. For example, in the book which originally inspired my idea, illustrator Christoph Niemann showed how the character for person inside a box gives the meaning of a prisoner. Hopefully this small taste of the language will entice readers into learning further.

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