Chen v Yang

Peter Bojanic makes some nice observations about learning the Chen style form, having already done the Yang for a while.

1. Fast and slow movement. Where as the overall Chen form is executed slowly (as if moving through water), there are continual hand movements that are quick and are difficult to follow.

2. There' s lots of hiccups. In the Yang long there are a few punches that we back up and repeat. My former teacher, Paul, called these hiccups. There are lots of hiccups in Chen style so the movement isn't as linear and straightforward as Yang.

3. Complex movement. There is much more complex movement in Chen style involving the arms and hands. From single whips to punches, there's a lot of intricacies involved that I'm not prepared to start describing because I'm still getting a hold of them.

Ni Hao ...

... or 你好 as it is written in Mandarin. Install Chinese language support (i.e. fonts) to see correctly.

Test yourself with these flashcards in Powerpoint: Words corrected! 19/05/04 11:08, Numbers. Install and use this add-in to randomise the slide order.

Update 13/07/04: more Chinese learning resources, especially a wonderful hyper-hierarchical Character dictionary at Zhongwen.com, including animated Han Zi stroke order (from this general resource, I think). I've also found this Pinyin site, which has audio clips of pronunciation.

I've noticed that this article is being referenced from a list of UCL language-learning resources. Welcome! I'll try and keep it up to date, but there's no guarantee of anything in this life ...

Three streams.

In yesterday's dead-tree version of Runner's World, a short piece on Tai Chi. I paraphrase: Tai Chi: Brilliant!! Docherty: "Chi is really another term for oxygen, so it's not weird and scary", and so on...

Hmm, curious, I've been thinking of both running and Qi in the same mind for years. And strange how many streams flow together. But all is illusory, since monkey-minds are machines to fabricate coincidence, especially when one looks for them. Still, here's what I found:

Tom Landini, a Feldenkrais-type dude, here refers to Danny Dreyer's ChiRunning (R). It's here again in Dreyer's book, and again in this AARP article (where you'll encounter more linkage). All very organised, I must say.

And over here in Zimmerman's vaguely running-related Zhurnal. He's more random, like me.

These days, many Feldenkrais practitioners around the world (Felden-what?) are on the web, and you can read their musings on the connectedness of all things internal/external, ancient/modern, with forms, or without.