A New Practical Primer of Literary Chinese (Harvard East Asian Monographs)
Forty lessons designed to introduce beginning students to the basic patterns and structures of Classical Chinese are taken from a number of pre-Han and Han texts selected to give students a grounding in exemplary Classical Chinese style. Two additional lessons use texts from later periods to help students appreciate the changes in written Chinese over the centuries.
Each lesson consists of a text, a vocabulary list featuring discussions of meaning and usage, explanations of grammar, and explications of difficult passages. The standard modern Chinese, Japanese, and Korean pronunciations are indicated for each character, making this a learning tool for native speakers of those languages as well. Appendices give suggestions for further readings, review common and significant words, explain the radical system, and provide Japanese kanbun readings for all the selections. Glossaries of all vocabulary items and pronunciation indexes for modern Chinese and Korean are also included.
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At Last!,
Finally! A very good text for introducing classical Chinese! I have looked at most of them and as a teaching/learning tool this is head and shoulders above the rest. Really in a class by itself.
I first studied Classical Chinese back in the days–yes it is true–when there were no textbooks available at all. That it has taken this long for somebody to produce a single volume that does what language text books are supposed to do (including exercises of various sorts, useful glossary and varied indexes, translations–just about anything you could need in addition to Korean and Japanese pronunciations)is surprising. But at last we now have such a book. It is written for normal language students, not ph.d’s in linguistics. And if, like me, you are studying on your own, this one works! I am enormously grateful to the author. He has opened the door.
I would give the book more than 5 stars were it to include just one reading from Buddhist literature (the Sinological tradition in this country seems to feel that Daoism and Confucianism are legitimately Chinese but that Buddhism is a foreign intrusion. Silly, that.) Too, putting in the simplified characters would probably help some students, as would calligraphic versions of characters since the printed versions can sometimes be misleading. But these quibbles aside, Prof. Rouzer has done us a great, great service.
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|Excellent for learning classical Chinese on your own,
This book will enable you to learn classical written Chinese on your own. Not that it will be easy — it’s still a daunting task, but the pace of this book, the way the material is presented, and the promise it holds for those who persevere (finish the book and you’ll be able to read interesting texts, not just the simple stuff) make studying this great language a real pleasure.
As another reviewer noted, no Buddhist text fragments are presented, unfortunately, but that, so far, is the only downside to this excellent textbook.
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|Scholarly, yet accessible for self-studiers of classical Chinese,
I just purchased this book in Boston two weeks ago and have hardly put it down since this is the book I’ve been wanting to get my hands on for a long time. I’m already halfway through and have learned a great deal about the culture, language and temperament of Chinese people of earlier times. The linguistic explanations are lucid and compelling, the choices of stories are riveting, and the commentaries on the texts are scholarly, yet down to earth. As the previous reviewer noted, an inclusion of modern simplified Chinese characters alongside the classical ones would be a big plus. Also, I would much prefer to see Hangeul and Japanese script instead of the transliterations in the book since I am interested in nearly all the Asian languages. “Thank you!” for including the very smooth translations of all the Chinese texts in the back of the book. I am also editing the book as I study it, and I am happy to provide the author with my comments (benoit.eugene@epa.gov). Overall, this is a great book for those who wish to delve deeper on one’s own into the historical and linguistic underpinnings of modern Chinese culture and language. Another good book to own is the ABC Dictionary of Chinese Proverbs since many of the grammatical structures which are discussed in the Primer are also seen over and over in the proverbs dictionary.
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