One of my favorite “simple” songs for erhu that actually takes a fair bit of skill if you’re following the proper fingering is Jasmine Flowers. It’s a lot of sliding between first and third positions for everything above an octave.

But you can cheat this on a violin thanks to the E string. I transcribed the jianpu onto the staff (with a handy online sheet music creator) so you can play it and also to illustrate how the notations correlate. I’ve been asked before how to read jianpu and for someone like me who has trouble differentiating notes on the different staff and ledger lines, it can be easier to follow numbers.

As you can see in my poor illustration of the fingering charts for a violin and an erhu, an erhu only has two strings and is typically tuned to D and A, i.e. the middle strings of the violin. The erhu key signature is the 1=G in the left-hand corner, i.e. G is the tonic. (This is G Major; I don’t know how they denote minor.) In the parentheses you see the tuning of the two strings (5[with a dot beneath] 2). That’s because of this:

G Major

G A B C D E F#

1  2 3  4 5 6 7 (in erhu notation)

D=5, but the first G you can play on an erhu is the G above that 5, so the open string D is considered to belong to the octave below, which is why it has the dot beneath it. The A=2.

Beats are displayed basically how Western notation does it: the lines beneath the numbers. No lines beneath is a quarter note, one line is an eighth note, two lines is a sixteenth note, a dot behind adds half the value, etc. In measure 4 you see “5 -”, wherein the quarter note is extended into two quarter notes, i.e a half note, i.e. the whole measure. (In 4/4 time, a whole note would look like “5 - - -”) Rests, not seen here, are 0.

Repeats, first ending and second ending, slurs and ties, and bowing symbols are the same. 

For string players, fingering is notated in jianpu using Chinese numerals for 1 (一), 2 (二), 3(三), and 4(四) and the Chinese characters for “inside” and “outside” to designate the strings. (Inside is D, outside is A.) I included the fingering of the erhu version in the staff version. One of the challenging things is something like measure 11. In third position on the D string, you play the B with your third finger and then using that same finger, on the same string, slide up and play the D, then come back to the B in third position. It’s gross and it happens a lot in this song. But, like I said, you can totally eliminate having to use third position at all by using the E string on a violin. It’s super brighter in tone, though. 

Jianpu is a relative notation system though. So if the key signature is 1=D, you get this:

D E F# G A B C#

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

When I first encountered Jasmine Flowers and complained I couldn’t play it, I was told to play it in D. Which you can totally do as long as you know your relative fingering.