Learn Mandarin for old Chinese texts?

[PeterTrox]

I don't understand Chinese yet. I am interested in learning to read old Chinese texts like Confucius' Analects or The Three Kingdoms or the Water Margin etc. Should I start by learning Mandarin Chinese, or should I start with learning old Chinese?

[vellocet]

A good question. I would direct  you to the classic essay, "Why Chinese is so damn hard."  It addresses learning Chinese well enough to be able to read a book and compares it to reading Les Miserables after a couple of years of French.

" Yet inferiority complexes or fear of losing face causes many teachers and students to become unwitting cooperators in a kind of conspiracy of silence wherein everyone pretends that after four years of Chinese the diligent student should be whizzing through anything from Confucius to Lu Xun, pausing only occasionally to look up some pesky low-frequency character (in their Chinese-Chinese dictionary, of course)."

 

hX

[Lu]

These books are written in (varieties of) Classical Chinese, so that is what you need to learn if you want to read them. There's not really a point in learning Italian if you want to read Latin texts, and the same goes for Classical Chinese and modern Mandarin. On the other hand, most people who can read classical Chinese also have a decent knowledge of Mandarin (even excluding Chinese people), so it would probably be a bit inconvenient to be an exception.

 

What is your goal? Do you just want to read these books for enjoyment, is it for studies, something else?

[PeterTrox]

Thanks for your answers. So classical Chinese differs a lot from modern Mandarin. That info already helps a lot for my decision.

 

I want to read the texts just for private joy. I like the philosophical insights and other things in them. It is not for an university study.

[Moshen]

Hi Peter,

I strongly recommend the following course, which takes you from the absolute basics of Classical Chinese to some pretty interesting philosophical old texts. I took it and halfway through the followup course and enjoyed puzzling through the philosophical material.

https://www.outlier-linguistics.com/products/intro-literary-classical-chinese

You might want to study a bit of written modern Mandarin first online to get a little familiar with how Chinese differs from other languages. And I really do mean a bit - just a few months.

Enjoy the journey!

[Jim]

The novels like Water Margin are linguistically quite different to the early philosophical texts, pre-modern vernacular rather that wenyanwen, so that would be a somewhat different area of study.

[Tomsima]

Jim has made the crucial point here: learning to read old Chinese texts is really an era by era endeavour. I worked through Rouzer before going to tackle the text id always wanted to read, a Song dynasty calligraphy manual. It turned out that the writing habits in the Song were totally different to the style in my textbook. I had fun learning the Song style, then when I was done I went to read a Tang calligraphy text. It was completely different, very little crossover. There is even an argument that even within the same era, there is no regional standardisation, so a classical text from the north is essentially a different language to the south (I once worked through 離騷 and came to the conclusion it was barely in the same language family as Chinese...)

[PeterTrox]

Thanks to everyone for the helpful answers. Like Moshen suggested I will first learn a bit Mandarin to get used to Chinese language's general principles. Then I will probably try Rouzer, ALPPLC. And I expect that I have to learn various dialects/languages for regions/eras.

 

The course mentioned by Moshen is probably worth its money but 300 dollars is too much for me. Maybe after some monthes putting aside some money.

[PerpetualChange]

Classical texts are difficult to work with. 

 

But, a modern Chinese understanding of these texts (especially the famous ones by Confucius and the like) is often informed by years of common interpretation and understanding. A modern Chinese working through a rarer text would be heavily informed on that text's meaning by historical commentary, and modern explanation. 

 

So, there is no real reason to learn Modern Chinese, but I can think of a few benefits:

 

• You have access to versions of these texts intended for Modern Chinese audiences, which are far more numerous than what we have in the English translated world
• You have access to the enormous body of research (mostly in Chinese) meant to understand and contextualize these texts
• You have access to videos and documentaries explaining the texts in Modern Chinese, which are far more numerous than such materials in English
• You have a better way to communicate with the greater community of people who care about such texts and have a firm understanding of them, the vast majority of whom are Chinese and perhaps Japanese 

 

So, there is no reason why you need to study such Modern Chinese, but you might find it to be a fruitful and complimentary hobby, especially if you intend to seek out as much material as possible related to classical China. Keep in mind that the earliest Westerners who began to study and translate China's earliest texts were missionaries who did not understand Chinese, and often worked with aids who may or may not have been literate, and usually spoke mostly Cantonese or other non-court dialects. 

 

[OneEye]

On 8/22/2024 at 2:18 AM, PeterTrox said:

The course mentioned by Moshen is probably worth its money but 300 dollars is too much for me. Maybe after some monthes putting aside some money.

 

We run sales from time to time. That course (and everything else we make) will be 40% off during Black Friday/Cyber Monday. There's also a 20% discount specifically for Chinese-forums members, which you can use any time (though it can't be combined with other discounts): just enter chineseforums20 into the discount code box at checkout.

 

I definitely recommend learning modern Chinese too, for exactly the reasons that PerpetualChange lists. Nearly all good reference material and commentary will be in Chinese or Japanese, so you need to know at least one of them well enough to use those works and have access to the massive body of knowledge surrounding classical/literary texts.

[honglam]

Chinese really have a complicated dialectological structure. Generally "Classical Chinese" is an ancient form and "Modern Mandarin" is a new form but in real world people may frequently see Classical Chinese sentences or usages in every day Mandarin since Chinese(especially the well-educateds) tend to use quotations and allusions. Circumstances, era and education background significantly affect the very language form someone may use.

So that's the problem. 论语/Confucius' Analects are one of those most "Canonical Classical Chinese" works, and 水浒传/Water Margin is a novel written in early modern Mandarin(still somehow different from the communicative language today), while 三国演义/The Three Kingdoms is something in between: It is written in early modern Mandarin, but mixed up with many quotations and usages of Classical Chinese. You could read Confucius' Analects with merely the knowledge of Classical Chinese, that's okay. But for the latter two, Water Margin and The Three Kingdoms, you should have both the knowledge of Classical Chinese and the knowledge of Mandarin(AND, since the language of these two novel is not CURRENT Mandarin but a historical form of Mandarin of their time, it seems that a book with exegeses is still essential).

When I was still a kid, we started to see lessons of Classical texts in the textbook of the 6th grade, and thorough lectures of Classical Chinese were given in middle school(i.d. the 7th ~ 12th grade), and it is a compulsory part of K-12 education in China. It's easy to understand that native speakers learn Mandarin first and then Classical Chinese. For foreign undergraduate students in my department, the course of "Modern Chinese" is given first, and then is the "Ancient Chinese" course. A knowledge of Modern Chinese does help learn Classical Chinese, since, despite of those major differences, after all, Classical Chinese is just a historical form of Chinese Language. English speakers would find the works of Shakespeare at least partly comprehensible, and that's the same thing to learn Classical Chinese with the knowledge of Modern Chinese.

I took a glance on the Rouzer's Primer and I wonder if it's a textbook for purely new-comers to the Chinese Languages as a whole because it doesn't really have any introduction of grammar in it. And it doesn't contain a general pronunciational guide, but only elaborations on the pronunciation of each characters showing up in the text - it is possible to learn a language without a knowledge of pronunciation but it would be quite less effective. Just as when I elected a course of Tangut(an extinct language of the Sino-Tibetan languages, which means it's just impossible to find the accurate pronunciation because the language has already died.) last year, reciting those Tangut Characters without knowing how to pronounce them really made me mad.