What do you think of your Chinese? If you think your Chinese is good enough, you can take part in the competition named Chinese Characters Dictation Competition(中国汉字听写大会).

Today teenagers are using more and more smart phones. They spend too much time in shopping, chatting, playing games and so on. Many of them cannot stop using smart phones to help with their study. Overuse of smart phones will make students too lazy to think and write. Some of them even forget how to write Chinese characters by hand. Teachers and parents are very worried about it.

In order to draw people’s attention to the problems above, in 2013 CCTV held the first Chinese Characters Dictation Competition. About 200 students from 32 teams took part in it. They stood on the stage to write down Chinese characters by dictation. Lu Jialei, a 14-year-old girl from Zhejiang, got first place.

Since then, the competition has been popular among teenagers. Many people are interested in this kind of competition, too. They like to write down the characters while the competitors(参赛者)are writing them.

Can you be the next winner?

As one of the most important languages in the world, Latin had humble beginnings. It originated along the Tiber River in Italy and only a handful of people spoke the language. Over time, Latin became more well-known as Romans gained political power. Many famous literary texts and scientific classifications (分类) were written in Latin. Even though knowing Latin indicated (表明) a person was educated, according to Britannica, in the 20th century less people learned Latin, leading it to be classified as a “dead” language.

There are around 7,000 living languages in the world, but, according to Britannica, “more than half are at risk of dying out by the end of the 21st century.” Civilizations evolve over time and so do languages. More often than not, a language dies because everyone who speaks the language dies. For example, Marie Smith Jones, perhaps the last native speaker of the Alaskan Eyak language died at the age of 89 in 2008, and so did the language. Now, less and less people speak Latin, which raises public’s awareness about its protection.

Actually there are many other reasons as to why Latin should be protected or taught. “It is a window into a fascinating ancient civilization, and studying an ancient civilization teaches us to respect different points of view and unfamiliar cultural practices,” says Kathleen Coleman, James Loeb Professor of Harvard University.

Since it isn’t used in ordinary conversations, there are a lot of difficulties that arise from teaching Latin. “Teaching a ‘dead’ language is different from teaching other languages,” explains Coleman, “because there are no native speakers to show us how it sounds or answer questions about the meaning of words or explain idioms. Though it’s hard, fortunately, we still can find the answers to our questions from the fragmentary (残缺不全的) evidence available in written texts.”