The Thousand Character Essay is one of the stock essays that Calligraphy students use to practice calligraphy. Living in Taiwan there is not shortage of "models" for this piece. Those models include standard script, seal script, cursive script and clerical script.
The trouble is, if you're Chinese isn't that good (but you still want to learn or do the calligraphy) it would be nice to have a reference book that includes the pronounciation and meaning for each of the characters.
As I'm in the midst of actually trying to memorize this essay, (which has the distinction of having no character being repeated, so it is actually one thousand characters long and is made up of one thousand different characters) I thought I'd make my own book to help make it easier.
This is the book I made. Each sentences or phrase has 8 characters and so I've divided it into blocks of eight phrases (each with 64 characters.)
My own goal has been to learn the cursive script for 64 characters each day.
Then I'll work on seal script.
Anyway, 64 characters in a sitting is doable, plus I've tried to lay it out in such a way that it is easy to look up individual phrases as well as individual characters.
The current edition lists the characters in order, plus has a rhyming index, where I've organized characters according to the endings of their pronounciation.
I think this can make pronounciation practice easier.
But try it out for yourself to see.
As I write this it also occurse to me that I should include a lookup index. I will probably include a Cangjie lookup index, a radical lookup index, a pinyin lookup index, and maybe even an english lookup up index.
Also to come, a "whole phrase" definition. Currently it only contains single character definitions.
As my calligraphy gets better, future editions may include a sample of my Cao shu or cursive style calligraphy.
