How hard is it to read the great chinese classics?

[Nithelin]

I've started learning chinese recently, and one of the reasons is so I could read the great chinese classic books like Journey to the West, Dream of the Red Chamber, Romance of Three Kingdoms, Water Margin, Art of War, Tao Te Ching and many others but those books are so old that I was wondering if they are too difficult for a non-native to understand them.

[Hofmann]

The four novels are in Mandarin, although not modern Mandarin. Art of War and Dao De Jing are in Classical Chinese, and so you'll probably need to study Classical before you can read them neat.

[vellocet]

Have you read Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard?

 

 

A teacher of mine once told me of a game he and a colleague would sometimes play: The contest involved pulling a book at random from the shelves of the Chinese section of the Asia Library and then seeing who could be the first to figure out what the book was about. Anyone who has spent time working in an East Asia collection can verify that this can indeed be a difficult enough task -- never mind reading the book in question. This state of affairs is very disheartening for the student who is impatient to begin feasting on the vast riches of Chinese literature, but must subsist on a bland diet of canned handouts, textbook examples, and carefully edited appetizers for the first few years.

 

The comparison with learning the usual western languages is striking. After about a year of studying French, I was able to read a lot. I went through the usual kinds of novels -- La nausée by Sartre, Voltaire's Candide, L'étranger by Camus -- plus countless newspapers, magazines, comic books, etc. It was a lot of work but fairly painless; all I really needed was a good dictionary and a battered French grammar book I got at a garage sale.

 

This kind of "sink or swim" approach just doesn't work in Chinese. At the end of three years of learning Chinese, I hadn't yet read a single complete novel. I found it just too hard, impossibly slow, and unrewarding. Newspapers, too, were still too daunting. I couldn't read an article without looking up about every tenth character, and it was not uncommon for me to scan the front page of the People's Daily and not be able to completely decipher a single headline. Someone at that time suggested I read The Dream of the Red Chamber and gave me a nice three-volume edition. I just have to laugh. It still sits on my shelf like a fat, smug Buddha, only the first twenty or so pages filled with scribbled definitions and question marks, the rest crisp and virgin. After six years of studying Chinese, I'm still not at a level where I can actually read it without an English translation to consult.

[ZhangKaiRong]

Well, after learning Chinese for 5 years, partly working with the language in a professional environment, communicating in Chinese every day and reading online media in Chinese, I still can't get myself to enjoy reading novels in Chinese. There are just too many unknown expressions, new characters and chengyus even in modern novels, and this frustrates me like hell, so I have to use a dictionary parallel with reading, which is a total turn off of enjoyment for me. I have no problems with business and finance related books, though.

I know some talented ones who can read novels in like 3 years of learning, therefore it should be possible for you as well, but not in a short-term.

[Lu]

I read my first novel in my 5th year. Some people do it faster, some never read a novel. I read a little bit of the Hongloumeng in a literature class for foreigners that year and after that abandoned all hope that I would be able to ever read that in this lifetime. I still read novels, some of them fast, but all of them still a lot slower than I read Dutch or English.

 

So yeah, Hongloumeng, Shuihuzhuan etc are really difficult, especially for a non-native. It will take you years of diligently studying the language before you get at a point that you can try. If reading them is your goal, and you keep working towards that goal, you can make it, but it will take time and hard work.

 

The Art of War and the Daodejing are classical literature, so that's a whole other thing. The Daodejing is notoriously difficult to grasp even if you understand all the characters perfectly. The Art of War might actually be the easiest work on your list, but you need to focus on Classical Chinese not so much Modern Chinese if you want to read that.

 

The good news is that Chinese is a great language that opens many doors, even if you never get to Hongloumeng level. The other good news is that there are excellent translations of all of these books.

[renzhe]

You can read about my experience here.

In short, it is doable if your Chinese is strong, but you should be able to read modern novels very comfortably before attempting it. Mine wasn't strong enough, so I struggled through it. Don't bother unless you've read at least a dozen "normal" books.

Start with modern, simple stuff, then work your way towards Wuxia and early 20th century classics (Lu Xun, Eileen Chang, etc.) whose language is more classically-influenced.

Once that is comfortable without a dictionary, you can consider one of the great classics, armed with the thickest dictionary you can get your hands on.

[roddy]

Welcome to the site, Nithelin!

 

If you've 'just started', those novels are quite a distant goal. There are plenty of TV, comic and children's versions you could maybe look at earlier though. 

[heifeng]

Also watching the TV shows/children's versions will at least start to give you introductions to these important key characters with whom you will become more familiar/hear more about as your Chinese studies progress Plus, you can always read more excerpts of varying difficulty levels as your language level increases.

 

I read my first novel in my 2nd year of Chinese (technically equivalent to 3th year I guess b/c I was in heritage/accelerated track), but it was still the abridged version of 围城。Then in my 3rd year I took a mandatory full year of Classical Chinese and this was my first intro to Classical...which to this day seems to always make perfect sense....only AFTER I read the annotated notes...Mostly I read 琼瑶 and various modern crime novels for fun and 老舍，鲁迅's short stories & plays. (or just 故事会 type stories...let's just be honest here, there is plenty of entertaining non literature out there to enjoy)

 

A few years ago I started to read 三国演义for leisure reading w/o an annotated version and maybe got 1/3 into it with ALOT of dictionary look ups. Then I got busy and couldn't finish. Impossible no.....time consuming...yes. Enjoyable-Yes, but you have to really enjoy looking up words (or just have an annotated copy to make your life easier). Ideally, I wish I could take a class and have finished it in a semester if possible!

 

 

Once that is comfortable without a dictionary, you can consider one of the great classics, armed with the thickest dictionary you can get your hands on.

 

or multiple dictionaries词典/字典/成语词典/王力古漢語字典 

[Pingfa]

So long as you can read the average modern vernacular novel well enough, I think Three Kingdoms should be manageable, provided you know a little about basic classical Chinese beforehand. You will probably have to consult the dictionary often at first, but after a few chapters you'd find it going a lot more smoothly.

 

Most would suggest Journey to the West as the easiest out of the 四大名著, but I don't know... when I tried it years ago I found it quite difficult. It is certainly written in a more vernacular style than Three Kingdoms, but it's a lot more wordy, more convoluted.

Grammar-wise Three Kingdoms is much more manageable since it is written in simple classical style and doesn't have long sentences like Journey to the West.

 

I would highly suggest familiarizing yourself with the background first, though. For me 三國 was relatively easy since I had already read the English translation (several times) and read up on the historical background, thereby circumventing what I imagine would be the most difficult obstacle: Distinguishing names and places from words.

 

Art of War is only 13 short chapters and you could read the whole thing several times over in a single day (if you can understand it, of course). I actually practiced classical Chinese this way; having already read several translations of it, I wrote out the chapters repeatedly and committed several of them to memory.

Though it probably isn't an easy introduction to classical, the extremely short length of each chapter makes it great study material.

I would definitely recommend it before any of the others you listed.

[roddy]

Great post, thanks Pingfa. 

[mandel1luke]

Three Kingdoms is difficult for anyone who has no encounter with Classical Chinese, because it is written in a mixed vernacular/Literary Chinese style. Dream of the Red Chamber has so many allusions and references, not to say many dated expressions, that you really need an annotated version to get the most out of it.

Journey to the West and Water Margin are possibly the simpler of the four, but still difficult enough to warrant getting an annotated version.

You are not alone in finding them difficult. I think most native Chinese readers find them difficult as well.

[li3wei1]

Plenty of kids' versions out there, probably for a variety of ages, with/without pinyin, with/without pictures, or even cartoons. Also movie versions. It might be worth starting a thread to compare these.

 

For instance, I've read about 20% of the 河北少年儿童出版时 version of 红楼梦, part of the 影响孩子一生的文学经典series (or maybe the 金苹果经典主因系列）. ISBN 978-7-5376-3218-8. Don't know how many characters in total, but it's 249 pages. Pinyin over each line, but it doesn't seem too intrusive (possibly the relative size of the characters). I've been finding it fairly easy going, apart from remembering all the names and relationships. Not sure what age it's aimed at, but judging from the pictures, it's slightly older than my version of 水浒传 （四川少年儿童出版时）， 140，000 characters， with little pictures beside some of the words, and a glossary of the main protagonists. Again, pinyin over each line, smaller than the Chinese. ISBN 978-7-5365-4569-4. Haven't read it yet, but it probably should be next on my list.

[laowhiner]

@liwei

 

 

Plenty of kids' versions out there, probably for a variety of ages, with/without pinyin, with/without pictures, or even cartoons.

This is good to hear. 

 

It would be awesome if there were Chinese equivalents of the Great Illustrated Classics Series. I could finish one of those in an afternoon when I was in grade 2, so I ended up reading 30 or 40 of them multiple times. I just looked at a sample chapter (http://www.greatillustratedclassics.com/v/vspfiles/images/20,000_LEAGUES_UNDER_THE_SEA-ch01.pdf), and it's still relatively entertaining. If anything like this series exists in Chinese, I look forward to reading it, hopefully in 8 or 9 months. I'll look into those you recommended. 

[imron]

If anything like this series exists in Chinese, I look forward to reading it

Have you seen the graded readers that Mandarin Companion is putting out?

[laowhiner]

I'm not sure how I forgot about Mandarin Companion. I own one (The Secret Garden) and read a chapter a couple days ago to gauge my progress. That series nearly meets my critieria, but i. Their stories are all adaptations of Western classics, not Chinese ones; ii. Their Level Two books only have 500 characters, which is fairly limiting; iii. They aren't very long. Those Illustrated Classics were over 200 pages, while Mandarin Companion's Level 2 reader is around 100. 

[Michael H]

To the original poster: as others here have said, it is possible for non-natives to read these works, but if as you say you have only just recently started learning Chinese, then you have a LONG way to go before you can think about trying this. So if reading these classics is your main motivation for learning Chinese, then you had better REALLY want to do it and have a LOT of patience. On the other hand you can have a lot of fun along the way. You can start with graded readers, gradually working your way up to harder ones. At some point you can start reading relatively easy modern fiction. This will be a big jump from even the hardest graded readers, but it is doable. There are lots of threads on this forum suggesting relatively easy novels to start with and giving guides to reading them.

[eddyf]

I haven't tried reading them but one point of comparison that seems useful is that Journey to the West was published right around the same time as Shakespeare's works. So when I imagine what it is like for a native Chinese speaker to read Journey to the West, I think back to what my experience was like reading Shakespeare in high school. You could get through it but it wasn't always easy and sometimes you had to rely on annotations or the guidance of a teacher. And I wouldn't necessarily recommend it to someone just learning English. Now I don't know how apt the comparison really is between Shakespeare and Journey to the West but at least we can expect the linguistic style to be about as far removed from the present in both cases.

[maera]

I've just posted my translation of a short excerpt from the Zuo Zhuan (Zuo commmentary o the Annals of Lu) with Chinese and English text on my website - you might like to take a look. It is about Lady Ying of Qin, wife of Duke Wen of Jin. I intend to put more translations up, but it's going to be a slow process (!) - you can follow my blog for a heads-up. http://electronicserendipity.com

I have found these two online dictionaries very helpful:

Chinese/English: http://humanum.arts.cuhk.edu.hk/Lexis/Lindict/

Chinese only: http://140.111.1.40/suoa/suoa.htm