A New Practical Primer of Literary Chinese by Paul Rouzer: All Chapter Links

[somethingfunny]

This is intended as a point of reference for anybody who is using "A New Practical Primer of Literary Chinese" (NPPLC) by Paul Rouzer.  Following from the original proposal thread for a study group based on this book, each chapter has been discussed and is now covered in one of the following threads:

 

Chapter #1 - A Few Proverbs

Chapter #2 - Yet More Proverbs

Chapter #3 - Yet One More Proverb

Chapter #4 - Guan Zhong Shows Up Late

Chapter #5 - Master Zeng Refuses a City

Chapter #6 - Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush

Chapter #7 - He Calls the Tune

Chapter #8 - Duke Mu Forgives the Horse-Eaters

Chapter #9 - Mizi Xia Loses Favor

Chapter #10 - Environment, not Heredity

Chapter #11 - Assassin-Retainers: 曹沫

Chapter #12 Assassin-Retainers: 專諸(1)

Chapter #13 Assassin-Retainers: 專諸(2)

Chapters #14 & 15 Assassin-Retainers: 豫让(1&2)

Chapters #16, 17 & 18 Assassin-Retainers: 聂政(1, 2 & 3)

Chapter #19 周幽王后褒姒

Chapters #20 & 21 鄒孟軻母 (1&2)

Chapters #22, 23 & 24 孟子梁惠王上 (Sections 1, 3 & 6)

Chapters #25, 26 & 27 孟子梁惠王上 (Section 7: Parts 1, 2 & 3)

Chapters #28 (孟子梁惠王下S1), 29 (孟子告子上S10) & 30 (孟子梁惠王下S15)

Chapter #31 李寄

Chapter #32 木兰诗

Chapters #33-36 莊子秋水 (1-4)

Chapters #37-40 莊子秋水 (5-

    

At the time of writing, most texts in Rouzer have been translated into English (to varying degrees of accuracy and excluding the later chapters).  Almost every chapter has some discussion of the grammar points and content of the lesson's text.  I encourage anyone who is interested in any of the texts to make a contribution.  I, myself, have posted in every thread and will definitely read any contribution, and most likely respond.

 

I would like to stress that much of the contribution here (and I include myself) comes from non-experts who are merely interested in Classical Chinese.  These threads should not therefore be treated as an authoritative reference, but rather as a place to come and discuss problems that you have found as you've worked through Rouzer, or to help other people solve their problems.  This series of threads started more than a year before I had even heard of the book, so please remember: you're never too late to make a contribution.

 

I had a great time working through this book and would like to mention those that I came across while posting in these threads who made great contributions:  navaburo, xuexiansheng, OneEye, stapler, Altair, evn108, yvesc and skylee.

 

Review

 

In short: This is a great book, and if you're interested in getting into Classical Chinese then it's a great place to start.  I can't compare it to any experience with any other book as this is the book that I used to start learning Classical Chinese, but I have no regrets.

 

The book is quite clearly designed as an accompaniment to a college course in Classical Chinese (specifically, Rouzer's own college course that he teaches).  The advantages of this are: (1) It starts from a very basic level and works up to fairly advanced texts by the end of the book. (2) It is entirely self-contained.  While reference to additional resources such as dictionaries and modern translations will improve your experience, it is not necessary and the entire book can be worked through on its own.  The disadvantage is quite simply that the experience is not as fulfilling as it would be if you were using it to study in a class, with a teacher telling you lots of additional material.  However, this is a problem shared by most books in this field. 

 

While it is self-contained, and does start at a basic level, I would not recommend this for anyone who does not already have a good grasp of modern Chinese.  There are more than 1300 characters to move through and having some sort of experience with the majority of them will make things a lot easier.  The book is entirely in traditional characters, which I was lucky enough to already have some experience with, but if you don't then it is something you will certainly need to consider.  Although, if you're considering getting into Classical Chinese, this is a problem you should have already considered.

 

The first ten chapters include numerous exercises where English needs to be translated into Classical Chinese, or vice-versa.  These were crucial for laying down the basic groundwork for what came later - you don't want to be getting tripped up by the easy grammar when the really tricky stuff comes along later in the book.

 

There are areas I feel the book could be improved, mainly in relation to making it more friendly to the independent learner.  It would be helpful if grammar constructs in later chapters had references back to where they were first covered - there is about 350 pages of material and it's frustrating knowing that something has already been covered but not being able to remember where.  There are times when several definitions are given for a character and Rouzer will indicate which one is relevant to the current text, but when the same character appears later with a different meaning it is sometimes not indicated.

 

This book will require a large amount of dedication to go through.  I was lucky enough to have a lot of periods of relatively free-time during the past year so managed to make it through pretty quickly.  I imagine most people won't have this luxury and I would set aside something like a year for the full completion of the book.  But in reality, I wouldn't really approach this as "I'm going to read the Rouzer book", but rather as "I'm going to adopt Classical Chinese as a lifelong hobby and I'll start with that Rouzer book."

 

Finally, I thought I'd say which part of the book I enjoyed the most.  I feel that Mencius' policies were too dull, and the Zhuangzi was a little on the tricky side, so I'm going to have to go with the Assassin-Retainer chapters, in particular the old hiding-you-knife-in-your-victims-favourite-fish-dish trick one of them pulled.  I'd love to see that as a scene in a movie.

[stapler]

Great work!

[roddy]

Excellent, pinned!

[OneEye]

This is awesome. Glad to have been involved, even if only a bit.

[Naphta]

Thanks a lot for this! I've been working with this book for some weeks now and I think my very few Chinese friends with real knowledge of literary Chinese were getting tired of my questions...

[somethingfunny]

Welcome Naphta.  How far into the book are you?  How are you finding it?  I agree with you - I don't think I'd like it very much if a Chinese friend of mine kept asking me to explain passages from Shakespeare to them, or something similar.  Mainly because I wouldn't be able to do a very good job at it!

 

Please feel free to post comments and/or questions in each thread as you work through - it's always nice to have other people's views on this stuff and while the action can be a little slow here there is usually someone who will be able to answer your questions (eventually).

[Naphta]

Thank you for the welcome, somethingfunny!

 

Today I started lesson 13, I usually learn one to two lessons per week. I like the book so far, I find it really useful but I found much harder the first lessons than the last ones, perhaps because longer texts give more context.

 

My main concern now is vocabulary. I haven't put much effort into learning the new characters on the previous lessons. When I learnt ancient Greek and Latin, I always supposed that these were languages that I was always going to read using a dictionary so I almost didn't memorize any difficult words. I got used to work with my grammar books and dictionaries and in general that was enough.

 

But now I'm hesitating. On one hand, actively learning new characters can be useful as many of them will sooner or later appear again in mandarin words. But it is also truth that it would suppose to actively learn all the old meanings of characters that I already know in their modern usage.

 

I use a reliable classical Chinese dictionary and it doesn't take me long to check up the words that were previously introduced but I didn't really learn. But I don't know how it will be when studying more complicate texts, I guess it can be painful to look up half of the words...

 

What is your experience regarding literary Chinese vocabulary? Did you learn it systematically or rather passively?

[somethingfunny]

For about the first ten lessons of Rouzer I would try to actively learn the new vocabulary, but after that I stopped.  I'm sure once I get onto reading full texts this is going to be a bit of a problem, but now - with introductory material - there seems to be quite a specific set of vocabulary that you can pick up fairly passively.  Obviously it helped that I knew quite a lot of characters as well, and I was already familiar with the basics of traditional characters.  The trickier thing is learning new meanings for characters you know from modern Chinese.