Idle courtiers

Chapter 162 The key to liberal arts is memorization
Speaking of our Lord Zhou, after the handover, he returned to Anton's hometown with a trace of melancholy and a trace of pride, prepared to pack, bid farewell to his wife and children, and prepared to report to the capital.

The proud thing is that he has finally been promoted to a level now, from the ninth rank to the eighth rank.And what he is doing is the most noble and promising pedestrian position in the imperial court. If he successfully squeezes into the ranks of the people's department, it will not take more than 20 years.It is still possible to have a large department of bureau-level officials.

This time he went back to his hometown to visit his relatives, and he also changed from "Master Zhou" to "Master Zhou." I don't know how majestic it is.

The sad thing is that if you want to be an official, you have to go to the imperial examination and get a Jinshi.

Isn't this nonsense, if I can pass the Jinshi exam and have so many twists and turns before, I will be a seventh-rank magistrate, and I can still be a teacher or a governor?
But if you don't take the exam, can you just give up this great opportunity?

Thinking of how good Wang Ruoxu was when he presided over the annual examination in Anton, Zhou Nan felt hot all over: Such a man should be!
After returning home, the family members heard that Zhou Nan had obtained the court's favor, and even called Amitabha, and set off [-] red firecrackers.

The gentry from the county came to invite him one after another, saying that they were seeing him as a farewell party, but they looked at him differently, which made Zhou Nan satisfy his vanity a little.

However, Zhou Nan didn't want to say big things in front of everyone, and then return to his hometown in despair after going to the capital.
Zhou Xingren kept a rare low-key profile, blocked all dinner invitations, and only stayed behind closed doors.

"Yunniang, where is the box of books that Shizhi County gave me?" Zhou Nan asked.

Forget it, since it is the emperor's decree, this imperial examination still has to be taken.It would be disrespectful not to go.Doing well in the exam is a matter of ability, and whether you take the exam or not is a matter of attitude.

Thinking of the box of books that Shi Jieren had given him back then, Zhou Nan decided to dig it out and read it. If he is not quick to sharpen his guns before the battle, he will be light, at least he can’t make jokes in the examination room.

Yunniang: "Not in the house, my husband, what are you rummaging about, and you get a head of ashes." Yunniang is pregnant now, and she is going to take care of the eldest son of the Zhou family. She looks tired, but her eyes are full of sweetness.

Zhou Nan was taken aback: "You can't really use it to put out fires while cooking?"

Yunniang: "Where can it be? Sister Su likes to read. She is going to read it. She also said that Mr. Shi's article was very good."

"Shizhi County can be a Jinshi, so the essay is naturally good." Zhou Nan's heart moved. Sister Su's education level is high, and Mei Pu's Chinese style was her gunner.Maybe I should ask her for advice.

Sister Su has been confinement and she is fatter than before.

The husband and wife had nothing to hide, so Zhou Nan told her that he was going to take the imperial examination, and finally sighed: "I haven't touched a book for more than ten years, and I have returned everything I learned before." Sir, I'm afraid I won't pass the test now, why do you think my lady will teach me?"

Sister Su asked, "What's the situation now, Mr. Xiang?"

Zhou Nan: "I can read words and make sentence sentences. As for articles, I can write official letters, but I can't write a single word in stereotyped essays. Just think of me as a young boy who has just started?"

"How could it be?" Sister Su was shocked, with an unbelievable expression on her face.Her husband's poems and essays are the best in the world, and she is also proud of it.But from what he said, he was just a big idiot.No, something must be wrong.

She thought for a while, then frowned and said, "Master, in fact, you don't have to be angry. Compared to a boy who has just started, at least you can read and write well."

Zhou Nan: "That's all I can do to comfort myself, my lady, go on."

Sister Su: "Young children start with "Hundred Surnames", "Three-Character Classic" and "Thousand-Character Classic". It takes at least one to two years to finish these three books. Then there are "Four Books" and "Five Classics". After reading all the classics, you can learn the meaning of the classics. After learning the meanings of the classics, you can start writing stereotyped articles. As Xianggong said just now, you need to start by familiarizing yourself with the "Four Books" and "Five Classics". Backwards like a stream."

"Endorsement?" Zhou Nan felt dizzy suddenly, and asked Sister Su how many words there were in the four books. When she asked, she secretly breathed a sigh of relief.

The Four Books actually don’t have many words. The Great Learning has 750 characters, which is only equivalent to a short essay; The Doctrine of the Mean has 560 characters; The Analects is more, 4000 characters; More than [-] words. ,

As for the Five Classics, it is not required to memorize them all.According to the imperial examination system, the elective examination is done once.After Zhou Nan thought about it, he could choose to study "Spring and Autumn" revised by Confucius.This book is only [-] words, the shortest.And most of them are stories, which are easy to read and enter.If you choose "Book of Changes", let alone memorize it, you won't even be able to understand it.

These five books add up to about 5 words, and less than [-] words. It is not difficult to memorize them all, which is equivalent to a booklet in modern publications.

Moreover, I also read the articles in "The Analects" and "Mencius" when I was in middle school.

Of course, memorizing these five books is just the beginning.When writing eight-legged essays in the imperial examinations of the Ming and Qing Dynasties, you had to follow Zhu Xi's annotations to do the questions, and Zhu Xi's annotations required more than 1 characters.

After you have memorized it, you have to start writing stereotyped essays.

In fact, stereotyped essays are not difficult to write, and they are not literary creations, so you don’t have to pay so much attention to them. First of all, you have to format this kind of official essays correctly.If the format is correct, you can at least get a passing grade.

The only thing that bothers people the most is that he doesn't know how to write ancient prose. He can understand ancient prose, but he really asks himself to write it.How to use words and how to write is a headache.

However, it is not impossible to solve it-recite model essays-stereotyped essays have been hundreds of years from the Northern Song Dynasty to the present, and the four books are just four books, with a mere tens of thousands of words.It can be said that all the topics that should be asked have been exhausted.Every sentence in the book is followed by numerous model essays.You read all these model essays, and even memorize them.Then according to the format, you can piece together a sentence from east to west to form a text.

There are a lot of articles in the world to copy, it depends on whether you can copy.

Thinking this way, Zhou Nan already had a plan in mind.Liberal arts, in fact, is quite simple, the key is to memorize and memorize.Read [-] Tang poems by heart, even if you don't know how to compose poems, you can also recite them.

I think that when I took the college entrance examination, I had memorized materials for three years in high school, not to mention [-] words, but [-] words.There are not ten thousand or eight thousand questions that have been brushed.

There are two piles of two-foot-high exercise sets on the desk for a long time. Could it be that the ancient imperial examination is more difficult than the college entrance examination?

Speaking of the college entrance examination, Zhou Nan is 28 years old this year, and that was already ten years ago.But so far, even after traveling to the Ming Dynasty.From time to time, he dreamed that he was sitting in the examination room of the college entrance examination, and when he got the paper, he was surprised to find that he couldn't do a single question, and then woke up in a cold sweat.

It's really an unbearable past, and now I have to suffer and suffer twice in the distant Jiajing year.

God, you are such a tosser!

(End of this chapter)