As I was designing the Persian-English Word magnet kits, I encountered many young Iranians whose first objection to the enterprise was that they could not read Persian script. "Honestly, it looks like Chinese to me," they would say. This brings up many issues, a few of which I will address here:

1. Don't panic: Persian script is a lot easier to learn than Chinese. Just one alphabet instead of 20,000 characters!
2. Learning Chinese is not such a bad idea. And perhaps not that difficult. A billion Chinese people can't be wrong!
3. The Chinese had a big influence on Persian Miniature Painting. Does a pictograph and ideograph based script lead to a culture that nurtures drawing?
4. This brings us to the Chinese movie "Hero" which shows the relationship between swordsmanship and calligraphy - calligraphy and country.

Persian script is a lot easier to learn than Chinese.

The Persian language uses an alphabet. That means it has a small number of symbols that represent sounds. A finite number of letters (32) combine to make an infinite number of words.

In contrast, the Chinese language uses thousands of unique characters made up of pictographs and ideographs. Each word or concept gets a unique character. You have to learn at least 3000 characters to read the newspaper, 6000 for literature or technical writings, and some dictionaries have up to 56,000 characters listed.

Persian might look complex, but it's an alphabet, and a pretty easy one at that once you get the basic shapes. It's not that hard to master. Just a few little tricks.

Learning Chinese is not such a bad idea

Chinese is turning out to be a major language in the global economy. You may have to grapple with it sooner than you think.

A billion people speak it, so it can't be that hard to learn. As for those thousands of characters, they are made of really only several hundred simpler characters combined and re-combined. There is a logic for them too. We didn't mean to imply from the previous section that Chinese was impossible. Just that Persian is easier.

Chinese for the Blind! They had to simplify Chinese characters for blind people (Chinese Braille!), and the method they used to do this is suggested as a way to help people who can't read Chinese (illiterates and foreigners). Think about Chinese braille. Think also about Chinese typing. They have to develop a code so that when you type on a keyboard with finite keys, you can generate thousands of characters. Alt, shift, control...I can't imagine typing Chinese. In contrast, I have almost memorized the Persian typing keyboard, just in time, too. The little stickers I bought to cover the keys have come off - especially on the keys I use the most.

Chinese visual arts and Persian miniature paintings

The Chinese had a big influence on Persian miniature painting. It makes sense that a culture with a character-based script (as compared to an alphabet-based script) had/has a well developed tradition of drawing and other graphic arts. In the continuum between letters and pictures, the mind that has to grapple with characters may become more visually receptive. Note that Persians also have a strong tradition of calligraphy.

I spent some time in Japan and noticed they have a well developed comic book market. Everyone reads comics. Adults, kids, housewives, business people. This also makes sense. Easier to convey things with pictures since your writing system is already pictorial. Chinese art influenced Persian miniatures in their day, as today Japanese Manga and Chinese Cinema influences global cinema. Check out this article on Hong-Kong Cinema.

Hero - A movie about Calligraphy and Country

Speaking of Chinese cinema and language, check out the 2002 visually stunning movie "Hero" (and on imdb). And check out this review of it. The movie "tells the story of assassination attempts on the king of Qin by legendary warriors who seek revenge for his subjugation of their nation. The king justifies his actions in the cause of unifying China, using the fact that there is no common writing system among the people to illustrate this."

A big sequence in the movie occurs when the Hero goes to kill one of the assassins who is hiding out at this calligraphy school. Before he reveals that he is there to fight the assassin, he commissions the guy to write a word for him. Apparently, there are 18 ways to write this word, he asks for the 19th. The idea is that, once he sees how this guy will write the word, he will know how to defeat him in battle - that there is a relationship between his calligraphy and his sword-fighting. I don't know if this plot device has been explored with Persian calligraphy in a movie (let me know if it has). It was a pretty intense sequence. The drama would hinge on your choice of word.

"Hero" is a provocative movie about language, war and unification. The movie has been criticized for promoting totalitarianism. The king is squashing dissent and unifying the country under one banner and one language.

This really annoyed me about the movie. Then again, watching the film, you see on the surface that it's promoting the virtue of "unity." But the emotions you experience watching the movie can easily diverge from this. The characters you love are the assassins and their rugged individualism, their deviance. At one point, there is a chilling view of "unity" when the king asks what to do with one of the assassins, and all the people of the court, in one voice, chant "kill him!" (or "execute!") over and over again. Like a bunch of vicious clones.

As you can see, we here at ajabanzabAn are biased towards diversity in language. We don't think unity is such a big deal. In any case, there is plenty of room for multiple languages and modes of expression. It's best, of course, to know several languages, especially a few of the more economically dominant ones. But don't neglect the ones that you are drawn to. And don't fear the loss of "unity." There is plenty of unity to be found in diversity as we see from the Persian "Simorq" myths.