Feed your hunger for Chinese culture by joining the Confucius Institute at the University of Iowa for a mini lecture series this fall, “Chinese Culture for Lunch,” beginning Tuesday, Oct. 2, with a discussion on Marvelous Chinese Characters.

Chinese characters are among the world's most ancient scripts, and are also used by the largest number of population in the world. Chinese character were historically use in Korean and Vietnam. There are still 2,000 Chinese characters commonly used in modern Japanese. Chinese characters are ideographic; they are quite different from Roman letters. How did the ancient Chinese create Chinese characters? Do you want to try your hand at writing Chinese characters with a brush pen? Please join us for this and more!

Yong Zhu will lead all talks in the series. Zhu is an associate professor at Beijing Foreign Studies University, China, where he teaches foreign students Chinese and also teaches Chinese students Second Language Acquisition Theory. He currently is a research scholar at the Confucius Institute at the UI. Zhu holds a Ph.D. in literature from Kansai University in Japan, an M.A. in linguistics from Peking University, and a B.A. in philosophy from Beijing Normal University.