"I'm your direct disciple, after all. But with this chicken scratch I call handwriting, I'm kind of embarrassing you," Ye Qianning said. She wanted to practice, but she never had the patience; there were just too many strokes.
"I don't mind that sort of thing," Dean Chen said, turning to pull his notes from a bookshelf. "Right now, I'm much more interested in your simplified characters. I've memorized the Pinyin system and can recognize any character that has Pinyin written with it. The initials and finals are a profound field of study. It's hard to imagine that just over twenty of them can be combined to spell every single word."
"You've already learned it all, Master?" Ye Qianning asked in surprise.
"Mm, I can recognize characters when they have Pinyin, but I still get a bit lost without it." Dean Chen had gone from initial curiosity to complete fascination. He studied it for a long time every day.
