Tự Đức thánh chế tự học giải nghĩa ca (chữ Hán: 嗣德聖製字學解義歌; 'Emperor Tự Đức's sagely study of character creation and interpretation song') is a Vietnamese book that teaches Chinese characters (chữ Hán) through chữ Nôm.[1] It was complied by the emperor of the Nguyễn dynasty, Tự Đức (1848–1883), around the 19th century. The book itself contains 13 volumes which are organized into 7 major categories.[2][3] It is written in the Vietnamese lục bát 六八 verse form.[4][5] It is considered to be an important dictionary for chữ Nôm researchers as it is a fairly complete Hán-Nôm dictionary with no ambiguous characters.[6][a]
The book and its 13 volumes contains 4,572 verses written in lục bát 六八 verse form. Within all of these verses, contains 32,004 characters with 9,028 of them being Chinese characters.[7] It can be considered as a bilingual Literary Chinese - Vietnamese character dictionary.[2] The book shows Chinese characters being glossed with chữ Nôm in smaller print. The annotations can range from one character to multiple characters, for example on the fifth line, 月 and 日 are annotated with 𩈘𦝄 and 𩈘𡗶 respectively.
According to statistics by Nguyễn Thị Lan, Tự Đức thánh chế tự học giải nghĩa ca holds the largest collection of Chinese characters that are annotated with chữ Nôm.[9] Hà Đăng Việt states that the Nôm in the book mainly uses three methods of creating characters, giả tá 假借 (phonetic loan), hình thanh 形聲 (phonosemantic compounding), and hội ý 會意 (compound ideographs).[10] But most characters fall into the method of hình thanh 形聲 (phonosemantic compounding) as it was seen as the correct way of writing chữ Nôm.[6]
The book itself has been transliterated into the Vietnamese alphabet by Trần Kinh Hòa and was republished by Chinese University of Hong Kong (香港中文大學) in 1971.[11]