Classical Chinese Reading Aids
Reading aids are available for the following texts:
- Confucius
- Mencius
How to use these reading aids
The above texts are presented one chapter at a time with Chinese text, Pinyin transliteration, and a vocabulary that lists the pronunciation and the radical/stroke count (but no definitions!). I have found it convenient to print out each page and use the extra space to write notes and translations. My intention is to help the beginning student of Classical Chinese (like me) along a smoother road to using a dictionary and learning vocabulary. For more information please see The Story Behind These Pages.
About the texts
The texts so far have come from the Chinese Philosophical Etext Archive at Wesleyan University. I have reformatted them in a database and linked them to data taken from the Unicode Consortium’s Unihan database. There are some typos and variants which I have indicated where I have found them.
Reading Chinese on the Web
On Windows, I highly recommend Internet Explorer 4 or 5 for these pages. If you want to use Netscape you should get the most recent version of Mozilla, because the support for modern standards (like cascading style sheets) and Unicode is very poor in Netscape 4.*. If anyone can provide me with recommendations and setup instructions for other Windows browsers and for browsers on Mac, Linux, etc., I would greatly appreciate it.
May 5th, 2005 at 7:53 pm
Looks to me like your pinyin guide is often not quite right on the tones… Did you pull those from the unicode DB?