Recently, a calligraphy blogger in Guiyang, China, posted a video on social media that sparked heated discussion. In the video, a budgerigar (budgie) is seen nodding and swaying its head as it fluently recites the opening passage of the 'Lantingji Xu.' Its pronunciation is clear and it speaks with strong rhythm. The related topic “My bird can recite Lantingji Xu” quickly trended online, making this parrot go viral.
In the video, this parrot skillfully recites: “Lantingji Xu, by Wang Xizhi. In the ninth year of Yonghe, the year of Guichou, at the beginning of late spring, we gathered at Lanting in Shanyin, Kuaiji, to conduct the purification ritual…” Then it seamlessly switches to blessings such as “Happy New Year,” “Wishing you prosperity,” and “Happy Spring Festival.” Netizens, amazed by the scene, joked: “I’m being shown up by a bird!” “This is the academic overachiever at the top level!” “Suggest enrolling it in school already.” Some netizens, however, questioned whether the video might have been synthesized by AI.
The video blogger, Ms. Yang, shared the growth story of this “top student parrot.” She revealed that this budgie is named “Qinglong,” and is currently a little over eight months old. Regarding how she taught the parrot to recite ancient prose, Ms. Yang explained that the process is actually no different from teaching a child to speak, with the key being “step-by-step progression” and “repetition.”
“First, you need to enlighten them, starting with short words like ‘hello’,” Ms. Yang explained, “It’s just like how children practice calligraphy: you start with strokes, then individual characters, then radicals and components. With parrots, you teach them four words first, then eight, gradually increasing the difficulty.” Ms. Yang noted that a parrot’s memory works differently from a human’s; instead of understanding meaning, they rely on repetition to “memorize by rote.”
She mentioned that “Qinglong” began language training when it was just over a month old, and it took two months to simply learn to say “hello.” Teaching the bird the opening of ‘Lantingji Xu’ was built upon that foundation and took about another two months, eventually enabling it to recite the first few lines as it can now.
When asked why she chose to teach it the ‘Lantingji Xu,’ Ms. Yang laughed that this had nothing to do with her career in calligraphy and was purely to add some fun to caring for her pet. She admitted that the original intent behind filming the video was out of a bit of defiance: “People all said budgies can’t recite like this, so I wanted to prove them wrong, and just shot this video casually.” She added that “Qinglong” is usually kept free-range, with food and water available at will, and she does not deliberately train it to recite with rewards.
Why can budgies mimic human speech? Last March 20, the internationally renowned academic journal ‘Nature’ published a neuroscience paper online that revealed a specific brain region in budgies functions similarly to the speech-related regions in the human brain. Budgies use the central core of the anterior archopallium, connected by the brainstem to the syrinx (the bird’s vocal organ), to produce a wide variety of vocalizations.