How To Learn To Read Chinese Buddhist Texts and Terminology

[Zenport_Professional_Tools]

Does anyone know of any books, textbooks, readers or primers that specifically teach the language used in Chinese Buddhist texts? I would like to read Chinese Mahayana texts and may even be interested in translating in the future so I'd greatly appreciate a primer or reader that will serve as an advanced introduction.  

[somethingfunny]

This was posted in the Classical Chinese section a while back.  Sounds like it might be the kind of thing you're looking for.  I've not been through it myself, although I would like to one day.

 

Which Mahayana texts in particular are you interested in?  Are you familiar with Buddhist principles?  From my (very limited) reading of Chinese Buddhist texts, the biggest problems I had were:

1. If they were translated from Sanskrit the quality of the language isn't great and there's lots of stuff like 阿耨多羅三藐三菩提 that you have to deal with.

2. I know pretty much nothing about Buddhism so when they start talking about 'the form is the void and the void is the form' I have no idea what they're talking about.