Talk:Nèijiā

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[edit] List of Wikipedians by martial art add yourself!

Wikipedia:List_of_Wikipedians_by_martial_art

I don't know much about martial arts, but I don't think the etymology with 家 meaning "family" in that context makes a lot of sense. In Chinese, the morph 家 often means "school of thought" like in 儒家 Rújiā ("Confucianism").

[edit] Soft/hard is NOT internal/external

Soft/hard is just not the same as internal/external. This thinking comes because most people have only ever seen Tai Chi in practice. I propose removing the hard soft terms from the article.Bihal 07:13, 12 January 2006 (UTC)

Six months later and I'm making the edit. Bihal 05:57, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

Soft Style (martial arts) and similar terms redirect here. If it's not the same thing, then we need a separate article for it. (Also, we need separate articles for external and hard martial arts, neither of which I could find.) -Toptomcat 01:38, 23 October 2006 (UTC)

I absolutely agree that a soft art is not necessarily internal, hence I have started a page hard and soft (martial arts) and changed the redirects from soft style and soft style (martial art) to point there. (Womble_bee 24 Oct 2006)

Have a look at these external links:

  • The martial arts FAQ [1] was built up over years of discussion on rec.martial.arts. In part one, there is an entry for hard vs soft and internal vs external.
  • Ezine article re hard and soft martial arts [2]
  • Stanford Jujitsu FAQ [3].

The redirects have been changed back to point to neijia and I fundamentally belive that hard/soft and internal/external are entirely different things. I'm not going to play tag and keep on changing them back - until we have cleared this up. (Womble_bee 25 Oct 2006)

Different schools have different usages for the term. In traditional T'ai Chi Ch'uan, we describe ourselves as "soft" and most other styles, with very few exceptions, as "hard". And for the traditional schools at least, the soft/external hard/external identification is absolute; we would never describe Judo as soft, for instance, as their quality of motion, in the opinion of T'ai chi practitioners is completely different. Not better or worse, but certainly different. Other people have different opinions, the opinion I'm reporting is based on writings and teachings of the Yang, Wu and Sun families which are in themselves opinions, if historically influential ones. So, for Wikipedia to make an article making an absolute statement as to what is hard and soft violates WP:NPOV and will have to be qualified or eventually deleted. --Fire Star 火星 20:39, 23 October 2006 (UTC)
I've added some citations in aid of shoring up the association of internal with soft, at least for the most popular of the big 3 arts. I was careful not to say that soft is better, and also careful to frame the quotes as opinions of the writers, not indisputed fact. This is primarily a western issue, IME, and due to bad translations over the years, and people not investigating further into what the old timers were really saying. Wu Jianquan, for example (in stories told by his grandsons) regularly worked with Shaolin practitioners in the Ching Wu Men and reported that their skills were nothing short of amazing. My experience has been that they were always careful to point out that the two approaches were different, not better or worse. For us to imply that they meant that soft is better (just as I can't put my hearsay stories in the article) is original research. --Fire Star 火星 21:54, 23 October 2006 (UTC)

The article hard and soft (martial arts) now seems to have accepted that Judo is a soft art, which is not necessarily internal. Can we now agree that the soft art, and soft style links should not redirect to neijia. Womble bee 11:28, 31 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Revsion

I have added some much needed structure to the article, but have been careful to keep the material that was there originally. I would like to see more content and I've added some external links to articles with further information. I'm not sure a casual reader would necessarily leave with a better understanding of the nature of a neijia art after reading the article in its current form. Womble bee 16:30, 19 December 2006 (UTC)

I have fleshed out the article with a lot of text plundered from the "Styles of Chinese martial arts" article, which I think now gives this article a better feel for the neijia. There is still a long way to go in improving this article though. Get writing! Womble bee 09:01, 21 December 2006 (UTC)