Classical Chinese
From Wikibooks, the open-content textbooks collection
Contents |
[edit] Overview
Welcome to the Wikibook of Classical Chinese. This book teaches the Classical Chinese language.
Knowledge of some basic Chinese characters before starting this course is assumed. You do not have to know a lot of characters, but you should already have an overall understanding of them, such as structure, radicals, and how to use a dictionary. Knowledge of Pinyin, Vernacular Chinese and Japanese could be beneficial, but is not required.
For background knowledge, such as what Classical Chinese is, the history of the language, etc, please read the Wikipedia article on Classical Chinese.
[edit] Organization of the book
The Chinese language, especially Classical Chinese, does not have strict grammatical rules. It does follow some elementary rules, but they are not as strict as in English. Here we teach you Classical Chinese by using multiple texts as examples, and explain each of them.
[edit] Introduction
Classical Chinese is a great language. It is the Latin of East Asia and heavily used until the 20th century. Classical Chinese is poetic, and might be one of the most compact languages in the world. That means, for expressing the same idea, it almost always has the minimum characters in Classical Chinese. (At least for stuff that exists in ancient China - there are just no words for Quantum Theory or Psychoanalysis in Classical Chinese.)
Also unlike many languages, Classical Chinese is not a spoken language. That is, it is not designed to be said out loud. Classical Chinese is a written language. You can read the text in whichever method you choose. Chinese people and Japanese people, even among Chinese people from different places, might read the same text in an absolutely different way, but only understand each other in written form. Here in the course, we use the pinyin system for the pronunciation, but do not worry if you do not understand pinyin, as we will not frequently mention pronunciations. If you are interested in how to speak the text out loud, please go to Wiktionary and check the pronunciation of each character in Mandarin, Japanese or other languages or dialects. However, Classical Chinese has its rhythm. As we have already said, it is a poetic language; so when considering how to speak text out loud, in some language or dialect, one must speak it in a particular way.
Traditionally, Classical Chinese employs no punctuation at all. However, books published nowadays usually come with punctuation to aid reading. The technique of recognizing each word or sentence from a piece of text is called "句讀/句读/Ju4 Du2(Sentence grouping)". It is one of the most important parts of learning this language. This course will teach you this language in a traditional way, but we will also introduce a limited amount of punctuation, and use spaces to split sentences to help learning.
Traditionally, the Chinese language is read from top to bottom, right to left. Because of the limitation of current web techniques, we use left to right, top to bottom in the course.
Next, we have some examples as an introduction to start our course.
