After some years of modern Chinese, I’m just getting into classical Chinese, with the long-term goal of studying the Buddhist scriptures. I was wondering if anybody out there might be able to share their experience and suggestions regarding the same. Are there any standard text books in English? What are some easy texts to get started with? What resources are available in Taiwan? What about finding a tutor or auditing classes, especially in Southern Taiwan?
Many thanks!
Princeton University Press has published a ‘Classical Chinese Reader’. It’s a three volume set with four supplements. One of the supplements deals with classical Chinese grammar, the other philosophical texts, and the other poetry and prose, and the fourth one I forgot. Anyway, you can google it. I ordered a couple of the supplements. They won’t be out until this October, I think.
When I was an undergrad, we used Michael Fuller’s “An Introduction to Literary Chinese” as our text book. It was very heavy on grammar and linguistics stuff. There are four sections, proceeding from very basic to more advanced.
However, if you really want to learn classical Chinese, I suggest going to Shida and taking “High School Chinese” (Gaozhong guowen) with Tang Jiuchong. The class uses the same text books as high school students in Taiwan and the lessons are mostly classical Chinese texts, the majority of which are the “Eight Great Authors of the Tang & Song,” but there are also quite a few others, as well as more advanced vernacular lessons. I’d strongly recommend that approach. 
Listen to LittleBuddha’s recommendations. He’s usually very well informed about all this. I should add, though, a few notes.
First, a small correction: According to a lot of people, Buddhist scriptures would be Literary Chinese rather than Classical Chinese. It depends on your definitions, of course, but I think a lot of Western scholars agree on this.
Unforunately, I can’t recommend a textbook. The one I used was a spiral-bound book put together by my teacher, South Coblin, that was stellar but I don’t think is available anywhere except my university in the US. An excellent book and an excellent teacher.
I can, however, say a book not to use, which is Shadick’s three-volume set. Shadick makes a major mistake shared by many scholars of Classical and Literary Chinese have made, namely that all Chinese before Modern was the same. This simply isn’t true. The use of 是 in the Zhou dynasty was completely different from that of the Ming dynasty. As Dr. Coblin noted, a person can always use archaic ways of writing, but they cannot use ways of writing that do not exist yet. A Qing scholar might use a very old relative noun construction, but a Han dynasty writer couldn’t have used a noun construction that didn’t occur until the Song dynasty. Practically speaking, this means that Shadick also inundates students with multiple meanings that simply aren’t necessary and make it hard to learn a given text’s meanings. As a parallel, it wouldn’t make sense to require a student to learn that cool can mean someone who is okay with marijuana smoking, if the student is reading Shakespeare.
I think that Shadick also makes the mistake of saying that some characters are 虛詞無意 “empty characters without meaning”. I recommend that you run fast and far away from anyone who starts talking about 虛詞無意. There is no point in writing characters that have no meaning, especially in a rigorously economical language such as Classical Chinese, and I believe that it never happened. Even a vocal pause like “um…er…” has meaning. Instead, talking about “empty characters” probably means that the teacher just doesn’t know what the characters mean but is unwilling to admit it. If a teacher cannot explain what a given character is doing in a sentence, don’t give them a hard time, but do take their ideas with a grain of salt.
Finally, get yourself a decent classical character/word dictionary. My favorites are two Mainland dictionaries. One is the 古代漢語常用字字典 Character Dictionary of Commonly-used Ancient Chinese and the 古代漢語詞典 Word Dictionary of Ancient Chinese, both published by 商務印書館 Commercial Press. Both should be available from Mainland import stores in the Gongguan area; both are very good at giving well-cited illustrative examples of words’ meanings. You need citations because, otherwise, you won’t have a very good idea of which dynasty’s meanings you’re working with.
San Min publishers do a great line in classical texts with annotations and modern “bai hua” versions. Loads of 'em in any book shop. Depending on your modern mandarin it’s a good way to do it.
Try something easy first . . . by that check out the text and see if you can grasp what its about.
HG
If you speak German, I’d know a great book that I studies with. Explains all the grammar in detail with tons of examples…
Are you stoned? I’ll see if I can put this in nice small words for you:
He does not know classical chinese. He wants to find a beginner text and work up to what you are suggesting. What you are saying is like saying to a Chinese kid who studies everyday conversational English to go and read Chaucer or Shakespeare.
You’re right, they are more interesting than standard textbooks, but they’re hardly appropriate texts for someone who has no knowledge of the fundamentals of classical or literary Chinese, nor of the differences between the grammar and vocabulary of it and modern conversational Mandarin.
To the original poster: I second LittleBuddha and Huang Guang Chen’s suggestions. Especially the parallel texts HGC mentioned, that sort of thing is an excellent way to get rolling.
I started learning classical Chinese with Mengzi, Laozi, Kongzi, Zuozhuan, Shiji etc…I was told that Mengzi is one of the easier ones, so maybe start with him?
Tang poems or poems in particular are not easy, if you have no basic knowledge about classical Chinese at all. I wouldn’t suggest starting with that.
How about buying yourself one of these text books with Chinese on one side and English on the other? Eventhough the English is most of the times not a correct translations of the original, but it at least gives you an idea about Classical Chinese…
University of Iowa, right?
I took Chinese from Professor Coblin in 1991. He is fantastic.
Hey, people. The amazon.com package just came in a couple of days ago… Princeton University Press… fresh of the press…
Classical Chinese Reader: it is excellent for beginners, intermediate and advanced students. It explains everything clearly. One book contains forty Classical Chinese texts, one book has all the vocabulary from each passage with detailed explanations in both English and modern Chinese (and, in turn, detailed explanations in English of the Chinese explanation for intermediate students who want to read the Chinese explanation, you know…) and the third book explains the grammar of each sentence in each passage in the same detail. In the back of the main textbook are exercises for a classroom.
All you need to know to begin is how to read pinyin. The whole book uses pinyin and traditional characters (for both the texts themselves and the modern Chinese translations)
The first lesson is ‘鄭相卻魚’… in which I learned that the character ‘或’ in Classical Chinese means ‘someone’. This book is a must.
There are 4 supplements which will come out in October… Oh, boy… When you start to learn Chinese, you will never be bored again…
The character ‘或’ in Classical Chinese doesn’tmeans 'someone’Mr. Sir. :bouncy:
What does it mean then?
I second Little B’s suggestion above. Tang Jiuchong is very good and the high school textbooks are a very good introduction.
Personally, I think you should work backwards–start with classical prose written in the Ming and Qing. If you do start with the classical period, I think the Shiji is much better the Mengzi. Better stories, and he makes sense.
But I would add that the ability to read classical Chinese and to translate it into English are two very different skills. Also some modern Chinese readers (including Tang) tend to gloss over how things mean what they mean in the interest of understanding what they mean. This can get you into trouble later.
To solve this, I would urge you to study translators like Legge, Arthur Waley, and Burton Watson very closely. You will learn a lot from them that will supplement what you learn from textbooks or from a teacher here.
It just means or. :bouncy:
Hey, guys.
The Classical Chinese Reader by Princeton University Press…
OH!
[orgasm emoticon]
或 means ‘or’ in Modern Chinese
或 means ‘someone’ in Classical Chinese.
The book is easy to read and it’s fascinating, too. The best textbook I’ve ever had. Including shipping, the three volume reader is about 1500 NT. Caves Books should have it. If they don’t, request it and they’ll get it for you. The supplements are about 700 NT each, but they haven’t been printed yet.
Mr. Sir, I wouldn’t go for these translations. Characters in classical Chinese are very tricky, they are not always use the same way!
或 won’t always mean “someone”. As soon as you read an other author or an other text or even in the same text, 或 might mean something else again. Note, 或 can also mean: 或許,也許,或者, 某人 or 稍微!
So don’t stick to one translation for one character only, you have to get the feeling for it and always be aware of many other possible translations and interpretations.
Have fun…=)
Orange+Blue…thanks… 
Yep, that’s the one. He is amazing, isn’t he? I could rave for hours about the coolness of Dr. Coblin. In fact, I have. I had a friend in the class with me and we’d spend hours just reveling in Coblin’s amazing grasp of Classical Chinese. After a year with him, I felt like I could really understand Classical!
I wish I’d had time to take Literary Chinese with him. I still get pretty confused with Tang dynasty & later texts.
And I also wish I hadn’t leant my textbook from his class to a friend… She disappeared with it and I lost the best reference I had about Classical.
Well, after several years of classical chinese classes with a great professor I don’t trust any of these translations and dictonaries anymore, that’s why I said, you need to get a feeling for it.
BTW, don’t trust Legge,Waley and Watson. They’ve made some terrible mistakes or just didn’t translate very accurately. So don’t fall for their interpretations…
You guys are all just jealous because I got the book.
Classical Chinese Reader in three volumes…
Princeton University Press…
First Edition 2004…
It Rocks…
It’ll make you want to wear your hair in a bun, drink tea all day and cut off your testicles for the emperor…
Today I learned 云 (yun2) means ‘say’ and some other stuff, too. More later…
that was the really annoting part in my class this past year… there were about nine of us in my class (pretty good for a school that won’t hire a second tenure track chinese prof)… out of us 9, there were 4 who could actually speak chinese all having either studied there or used to live in hong kong, then there was one who also studied in china but spoke chinese like a drunken perverted japanese man… and the other four were, unfortunately not so bright… two of them were only in second year chinese (which doesnt say much because it took them one year to learn one semester’s worth of elementary chinese and their pronunciation was akin to that of a yak in heat speaking anything but a tonal language) and the other two were in their third year but also could not read or speak chinese (one of them did not even recognize 老師的師 and when we were giving him hints “ryan… you know 何老師, right!!!” he would just stare at us.)… really effing frustrating… it took those four kids about two or three months to realize that 之 has more than just one meaning… and the sad part about it was that my prof would meet with those four kids three times a week and the other five of us would only meet twice a week…
needless to say, i unfortunately didnt learn all that much since it had to be dumbed down… hopefully i can get this gem and use it for my own teaching… (sorry for the rant. i still hurt from that class)
Did lesson 4 today. And now, I’m going to translate a Classical Chinese text about Stinky Guy, a cult figure in ancient China. Hopefully, after reading my translation, Princeton University Press will hire me for their next Classical Chinese Project.
逐臭 - Follow the Stink
人有大臭者 - Among the people, there was Stinky Guy.
其親戚，兄弟，妻妾，知識 All his relatives, brothers, wife, girlfriends,
friends…
無能與居者 － None of them could live with Stinky Guy.
自苦而居海上 － He got depressed and moved to a place by the sea.
海上人有說其臭者 － Among the people by the sea, there were some who
liked Stinky Guy’s stink.
晝夜遀隨之而弗能去 － Day and night, they followed Stinky Guy,
enchanted by his stink.
I learned today that 說 can also be read ‘yue4’ and is the same as 悅
Classical Chinese Reader: A Basic Reader in 3 Volumes… Ah… 