Teach me how not to think about her is a vernacular poem written by Liu Bannong in London in 192, which was set to music by Zhao Yuanren in 1926. It is a popular China art song among young intellectuals in China in 193s. Liu Bannong is a linguist, poet, novelist, translator, and a pioneer of the May 4th New Culture Movement. His achievement in phonetics is mainly the experiment of Chinese four tones. In philology, his outstanding contribution is to create the word "she" as the third person pronoun of women in Chinese characters. He is the leader of China's vernacular poetry. I have read his collection of poems, Yang Bian Ji (Teach me how to miss her). Some of them are very popular and civilian. Many sentences are written in the daily spoken language of ordinary people, and even poems and recorded folk songs are written in the dialect of Jiangyin, my hometown. There is another interesting legend about Liu Bannong's poem "Teach me how not to think about her". Zhao Yuanren's wife, Yang Buwei, has a narrative in her memoir Miscellaneous Notes on the Zhao Family. Around 193, Yang Buwei taught in Beijing Women's College of Arts and Sciences. Her female students loved to sing "Teach me how not to think about her". Later, the lyricist Liu Bannong was ordered to take over the college. Liu Bannong came to school wearing a Chinese blue cotton robe. The female students secretly talked: "I heard that Liu Bannong was a very elegant literati, so how could he be an old man?" When Yang Buwei heard this, he told these female students, "You are singing his" Teach me how not to think about her "all day long. This is him." The female student got up and said, "Isn't this person like it?" Others said, "Didn't your Mr. Zhao write this song?" Yang Buwei said: "Mr. Zhao composed the song, but he wrote the lyrics." Later, when Liu Bannong learned about it, he put in four words: Teach me how to miss him, and invite me to have a cup of tea. I see such an old man. Teach me how to think about him again. Zhao Yuanren, the composer of Teach Me How to Forget Her, was the most prestigious linguist in China in the last century. When I was young, I used to work in linguistics in colleges and universities. It is said that Zhao Yuanren's listening ability is particularly good. He went out to inspect dialects, and it only took him three days to sort out the phonetic laws of local dialects every time he went to a new place. Composing and singing were Zhao Yuanren's hobbies, and his amateur music level was higher than that of ordinary professional musicians at that time. Especially in chorus writing, his level is higher than the average. His chorus Hai Yun (Xu Zhimo's Ci) is still a masterpiece even by modern standards. His solo is also different. Take "Teach me how to miss her" for example. The melody is beautiful and full, which not only accurately conveys the spirit of the lyrics, but also enhances the artistic conception of the lyrics. In this song, Zhao Yuanren arranged the tone sandhi with great skill, which was rarely seen in China's works at that time. This song is composed by western methods, but the melody is completely Chinese, and it is not a general transplant or adaptation of folk songs, although Zhao Yuanren himself said in "Song Note": "It's a bit like the last words of Xipi original board in Beijing opera." But I think it's a completely new tune. I want to ask four more questions about Teach Me How to Don't Think of Her: 1. Is the last word in Teach Me How to Don't Think of Her a man or a woman? In Selected Songs of Zhao Yuanren, edited by Beijing People's Music Publishing House in 1981, he was male, but in Father Liu Bannong, written by Liu Xiaohui, she was female. In the 192s, with the rise of vernacular Chinese and the emergence of translated literature, the third person of Chinese characters was gender-neutral, which caused a lot of inconvenience. At this time, Liu Bannong proposed to create a new word "she". Mr. Zhou Zuoren revealed the news in the then New Youth magazine (August 1918), which caused great positive and negative repercussions. Liu Bannong's article "The Problem of Her Words" was published in Shanghai Current Affairs News (August 9, 192). Less than a month later, Liu Bannong wrote "Teach me how not to think about her". There is a sentence in Liu Xiaohui's book Father Liu Bannong: On September 4, 192, she wrote "Teach me how not to think about her" in London, and introduced the word "she" into the poem for the first time. Based on all the data, the original should be a female "she". Second, the title "Call me" and "Teach me" are not unified. I checked various versions and it seems that both are used. Even in Liu Xiaohui's book Father Liu Bannong, sometimes "Call me" and sometimes "Teach me" are used, which seems to be synonymous. Third, there are inverted words in this song. For example, the word "call me" sounds like a "foot nest" in singing. Mr. Wang Zhan of Hong Kong once mentioned this point, and the song translator Xue Fan once told me about it. The author thinks that this is because the 193s was the initial period of China's modern art songs. The composers did not pay attention to the relationship between the four tones of Chinese lyrics and the progress of music. They paid more attention to music to express the artistic conception of the lyrics as a whole. In this respect, "Teach me how not to think about him" can be regarded as a successful example. Because of the beautiful lyrics and music, the classic status of this song has not been affected by inverted words for 8 years. 4. Who is the "she" in "Teach me how not to think about her"? When Mr. Zhao Yuanren returned to China in 1981, someone asked Mr. Zhao, who replied: I miss my motherland. Personally, I have understood this song as a love song since I was young, and the original name of "Teach me how to miss her" was "Love Song" for the first time. Of course, the love of the motherland is also love, but judging from the words and sentences in this poem, it is closer to the "love" of men and women. As a lyric poem, it is not necessary to rigidly define the specific meaning of every detail, and readers should be allowed to understand, imagine and understand the connotation of the poem. Teach me how not to miss her, the feelings of the motherland, the love between men and women, whether it is her or him, can be understood by singers and listeners themselves.