Any good advice on starting to study Classical Chinese?

[bill]

Do you have any good advice on materials to start studying classical Chinese?

My modern Chinese is at newspapers/easy novel stage but I haven't really tried reading guwen yet.

Specifically:

Any course books you'd recommend? I've heard "Classical Chinese Grammar" by Edwin G. Pulleyblank is good, but I can't browse it from here in Beijing. Are there any good guides in Chinese (suitable for foreigners?)

The best place to start? I've tried a few of the Shi Jing and some Confucious, but if you have any advice on easy/easier places to begin that would be welcome

Any general advice on a plan of attack? I'm expecting to take several years over this, as I have with putonghua. As much advice from those who've been there before me would be great.

[marcopolo79]

Michael A. Fuller's "An Introduction to Literary Chinese" (published by Harvard University Asia Center) is the best book by far, I've used it, and have seen some pretty good results. Also, see my post on 蔡志忠 here http://www.chinese-forums.com/viewtopic.php?t=4211

[gato]

I've working through Gregory Chiang's Language of the Dragon: A Classical Chinese Reader, Vol. 1 and 2, and have been pleased with the books.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0887272983/qid=1107821292/sr=8-2/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i2_xgl14/104-6028893-5635168?v=glance&s=books&n=507846

Also take a look at this guide put together by an Amazon.com shopper:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/guides/guide-display/-/1M8SRYGKFRHG0/ref=cm_bg_dp_m_1/104-6028893-5635168

Naiying Yuan (a faculty at Princeton, I believe) just came with a series of introductory texts recently: Classical Chinese : A Basic Reader in Three Volumes

It's supposed to be good, too. But I'm pretty happy with Chiang's books. I'm almost done with Volume 2 and have been reading The Analects with the help of Wenlin and an English translation.

Edward Pulleyblank's grammar book is meant as a reference. I haven't seen it, but I doubt it's the best place to start for a beginner.

[markalexander100]

I've been using the Fuller book. It's taxing, but good. He doesn't give answers to the exercises, but unless you have more backbone than me that's probably for the best.

[bill]

Thanks for the advice guys - I'll be paying a visit to amazon.com later this week!

Do you have any other general advice on studying classical Chinese? I expect to be doing most of this by self-study, but as I live in Beijing I have lots of people around who can help.

However, if you have any advice that could stop me heading up blind alleys, that would be great.

[markalexander100]

I've been told that Mencius is the best place to start: I forget the exact reason, but it was along the lines that his language is relatively simple and/or standard. He's certainly worth reading, anyway.

[ChouDoufu]

bill, you since you're in beijing, you might want to check out BLCU's Classical Chinese Textbook series 古代汉语课本 by 徐宗才.

he's actually one of my teachers. he's good and the book is pretty decent. it's a potpourri of classical texts. he basically starts from some easier texts and as the book goes on it gets progressively harder. word definitions are in english and in chinese. but gramar/sentence patterns are in chinese only. the thing that's nice about this series is it introduces you to a lot of different sources, so if you like one, you can look for it on your own. one bad thing is example sentences in the grammar sections don't have any translation (chinese or english) and the examples are often much harder than the current chapter of the text. If you don't understand the words in a sentence, it doesn't make for a good example.

also a definite must buy is 古代汉语常用字字典 by this really famous guy who 王sorry i can't remember his name right now, but it's two characters only. he's the mack in terms of classical chinese study (apparently). most college students study from his book and use this small dictionary. he also has a huge one, but huge dictionaries aren't that useful in ancient chinese because they have too many definitions and examples. this dictionary is good enough for chinese college students studying ancient chinese, so it's good enough for me. again, this is a must, must buy. make sure you get the simplified (or traditional version) whichever applies to you.

[Jim]

Why I have the 1997 edition here before me choudoufu - it's by 王力 and an eminent editorial committee, published by the 商务书店. I've don't read as much classical stuff as I once did but I remember the dictionary being very good.

[ChouDoufu]

yeah, that's who it is.. the 1997 version is the current one. (I guess classical chinese hasn't changed all that much in 8 years... haha)

[Jack MacKelly]

I've working through Gregory Chiang's Language of the Dragon: A Classical Chinese Reader' date=' Vol. 1 and 2, and have been pleased with the books.

[url']http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0887272983/qid=1107821292/sr=8-2/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i2_xgl14/104-6028893-5635168?v=glance&s=books&n=507846[/url]

Also take a look at this guide put together by an Amazon.com shopper:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/guides/guide-display/-/1M8SRYGKFRHG0/ref=cm_bg_dp_m_1/104-6028893-5635168

Naiying Yuan (a faculty at Princeton, I believe) just came with a series of introductory texts recently: Classical Chinese : A Basic Reader in Three Volumes

It's supposed to be good, too. But I'm pretty happy with Chiang's books. I'm almost done with Volume 2 and have been reading The Analects with the help of Wenlin and an English translation.

Edward Pulleyblank's grammar book is meant as a reference. I haven't seen it, but I doubt it's the best place to start for a beginner.

good links there

[bill]

I eventually went for "Classical Chinese : A Basic Reader in Three Volumes".

A couple of weeks in, here are my thoughts.

The books are BIG - I'm not sure why they need books this size and there's a huge amount of white space. It's not that portable, especially if you take a decent sized dictionary too.

The books use complex characters, so for me the books are also teaching me how to read these - I've only used simplified before.

The text selections are very short and so far they contain only characters I've seen before. If you know some Chinese, this allows you to concentrate almost wholly on sentence structure rather than new vocab. There's a LOT of grammar in there (the sentence analysis volume is by far the largest) to study in either English or Chinese. I would have to say I'm a little disappointed by the amount of classical Chinese the books have, but I'm impressed with the rest of the package.

A lot of the text are based around chengyu - if you're interested in these, the book gives 10 or 15 of them, together with the original texts they come from.

They have a number of useful looking exercises at the back, but these come with no answers.

I think these books can help to give you a method of analysing and understanding classical Chinese, rather than anything like a reading course. I'm hoping to work through them pretty quickly and then hit a Chinese university or high school textbook afterwards.

If you're interested in the books, let me know of any questions and I'll try to give you more info.

[gato]

The books are BIG - I'm not sure why they need books this size and there's a huge amount of white space. It's not that portable, especially if you take a decent sized dictionary too.

It seems that Gregory Chiang's "Language of the Dragon: A Classical Chinese Reader," which I used, is more compact and has a better balance between reading material and grammatical analysis.

After some basic study, you might want to try to read Confucius and Laozi in the original at http://zhongwen.com/

It's fun to read them (together with one of their many English translations available on the web), even if you don't understand everything the first time around. These books are fairly short and bear repeat readings.

[Ah-Bin]

王力 (Wang Li) wrote an excellent series of four books called "古代漢語" which you should be able to by cheaply. It is in traditional characters and the explanations are all in Chinese but contains a dictionary of common words. The texts it begins with are not so easy, though.