Chinese student desperation move - memorize archaic poetry as lyrics

[cashew]

So, during the national exams, Chinese students are expected to be able to recall from memory a metric shit ton of poetry. To help the kids along, some industrial graduates turned the poems into song in hopes of helping students retain the information better.

Behold, archaic Chinese poetry set to song.
(I remember like...2 of these?)

The funniest part is that in the comments, there are users proclaiming they were singing the songs to themselves during exams because it was the only way they could recall the lines anymore. 😂😆

The songs are categorized by the memorization difficulty (star rating) and whether they fall into the "must memorize", "optional memorize" (unlikely to get tested), or "bonus points" (be able to understand if not regurgitate word for word) section. The "must memorize" poems actually are alluded to a lot in modern media, be it pop songs or TV shows, so I can understand the decision to make the poor kids memorize these things, but still... 5000 years is a lot of "important" poetry to memorize.

Chinese students have it rough. 🤣

Comments

[tanithryudo]

An hour and half of song is not all that easy to memorize either...

So glad I didn't graduate high school in China. <.

[cashew]

Me, too. I'm glad I avoided that craziness. Like, I understand needing to know this stuff, but the amount of shit needed to recall from memory is beyond reasonable.