The Story Behind Classical Chinese Reading Aids
My First Steps toward Learning Chinese
First, a disclaimer: this page describes how I learned what I know of Classical Chinese, but I am hardly a beginner at language learning in general. I have PhD in Classical Studies and have studied Classical Greek since 1985 (my freshman year of college) and Latin since 1981 (my freshman year of High School). I also know French, German, Italian, etc., and enough Arabic to get directions to the bus station in Damascus. If I make it sound too easy, that may be why.
Second, another disclaimer: the only way to learn a language well is with a teacher or a native speaker who can help you. I recommend this over self-study.
With that said, learning to read Chinese is not that difficult once you overcome the hurdle of the writing, which is the shortcoming of most of the books I have encountered. I am a devotee of Teach Yourself books, so the first thing I did was pick up their Teach Yourself Chinese. Most of the lessons are given in transliteration, which I find makes it difficult to learn vocabulary (which is already the hardest part of teaching yourself a language). Some software, Power Chinese from Transparent Language, helped me to learn pronunciation and some of the writing, but the emphasis was still on the modern spoken language with little information about reading or classical literature.
My next step was to get Gateway to the Chinese Classics: A Practical Guide to Literary Chinese by Jeanette L. Faurot. This is a great book, full of grammatical and cultural information and extracts from classical literature, but what vocabulary there is is arranged alphabetically in Pinyin. If you are looking at a symbol and can’t remember its pronunciation, there is nothing you can do but scan the entire list of vocabulary. I then found the Dover reprint of James Legge’s edition of Confucian Analects, the Great Learning and the Doctrine of the Mean. This is a reprint of a classic edition (therefore, it is bit out of date) that has the Chinese texts, notes, and a dictionary of all the symbols at the back. Of course, having the dictionary really impressed on me the fact that you must learn to write Chinese in order to read Chinese. Since the dictionaries are arranged by the number of strokes it takes to write a symbol, you have to know that a box is written in three strokes, not four. So I picked up a wonderful little book, Learn to Write Chinese Characters by Johan Björkstén–in it you get a good basic introduction to the history, aesthetics, and techniques of writing Chinese. I now understood how difficult it is to use the dictionary in Legge’s edition since it lacks a radical chart.
I Discover the Way
It is fair to say I felt some despair. At this point, however, I discovered the book that was to get me over that initial difficulty: An Introduction to Classical Chinese by Raymond Dawson (Oxford, Clarendon Press: 1968). Unfortunately, this book is out of print, but if you can find it at your library, it has long extracts from Mencius with a good vocabulary and grammatical lessons. It is designed to teach you Chinese as you go, so you don’t need any knowledge beforehand. Dawson also gives a key to the radicals of all the characters in the first passage as well as a list of characters with "obscure" radicals, which helps immensely at learning to use a dictionary. I used this in conjunction with Edwin G. Pulleyblank’s Outline of Classical Chinese Grammar, which contains good explanations of many grammatical constructions, though it is intended mainly for scholars.
Impatience: The Mother of Software Development
I was now making real progress, but sometimes I just could not figure out the radical of a character and I had no one to ask. Naturally, I started to look on-line and found zhongwen.com which has classical texts linked to an excellent etymological dictionary. Still, I sit in front of the computer a lot, and don’t find it pleasurable to be tied to my desk when I want to read some Confucius. What I needed was a way to make handouts for myself. I then found the Chinese Philosophical Etext Archive at Wesleyan University, looked up a text of Mencius, started cutting-and-pasting into a word processor and printing out nicely formatted pages with big, readable Chinese text. Of course, this didn’t help with vocabulary troubles, and it was labor-intensive. When you’re a programmer, once you’ve done something twice you naturally want to write a program to do it the third, fourth, fifth..nth times (according to Larry Wall, the creator of Perl, the three virtues of the programmer are laziness, impatience, and hubris). I knew that the Unicode Consortium’s Unihan database contained the pronunciation and radical/stroke count for every character, so I thought I would be able to program something that would link the this data to the text. Fortunately as the assistant editor of the Database of Classical Bibliography and the creator of Recent Ovidian Bibliography (a database-backed web site) I know a thing or two about databases and programming for the web. I set to work on something that would make nice handouts with big, readable Chinese, and that would give some vocabulary help but not too much.
Vocabulary Stinks
In my experience studying language and teaching Latin for several years, the worst part of learning a language is learning the vocabulary. The only way to do it is through repetition, and no one likes repetition. In a classroom setting, the threat of humiliation motivates students somewhat, but when you are doing it on your own the temptation is too great to skip memorization and just look everything up. The problem with Chinese is that looking everything up is very burdensome, especially when you do not even know where to begin looking because you can’t figure out the radical of a character. This is where my Classical Chinese reading aids come in.
These pages are designed to speed up the use of a dictionary and in this way to speed up the inevitable repetition through which the words and characters will actually be learned. Each page gives a section of text followed by a Pinyin transliteration and a vocabulary list such as this one:
| Word | Radical/Strokes | Pronunciation | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 學 | 39.13 | 子,孑,孒,孓 | xué |
| 時 | 72.6 | 日 | shí |
| 習 | 124.5 | 羽,羽 | xí |
| 亦 | 8.4 | 亠 | yì |
| 說 | 149.7 | 言,訁,讠 | yuè |
| 朋 | 74.4 | 月 | péng |
| 自 | 132.0 | 自 | zì |
| 遠 | 162.10 | 辵,辶 | yuăn |
| 方 | 70.0 | 方 | fāng |
| 來 | 9.6 | 人,亻 | lái |
| 樂 | 75.11 | 木,朩 | lè |
| 知 | 111.3 | 矢 | zhī |
| 慍 | 61.10 | 心,忄 | yùn |
Each character is given with its radical and stroke count, the character for the radical with its variations, and a pronunciation. The twenty-five most common characters for each text (given on a separate page) are excluded from this list. The idea is that once you’ve seen enough characters with radical 149 (言) you’ll start to recognize it. This format helps you to get to that point more quickly and with less frustration. The definitions are left out so that you still have to go through the process of looking up the words you don’t know, by which you will eventually learn the more common characters.
Now, to paraphrase Master Kong:
學中文而時習之, 不亦說乎?
June 29th, 2005 at 2:03 pm
Do you read chinese from right to left (or bottom to top on a scroll)?
June 29th, 2005 at 2:10 pm
The examples on this site run left-to-right, top-to-bottom for simplicity’s sake, but Chinese is often read top-to-bottom, right-to-left. Since the characters are single entities without a beginning or an end like an English word, the can be written in any direction.