General Literary Chinese from Scratch/Appendices

Appendix A: Resources In the interests of ensuring a smooth experience, several resources will be provided here: Pleco - An Android app that allows swift, easy access to characters. The dictionary, Kroll's Dictionary of Medieval Chinese, is an incredibly useful resource for English-medium learners, and can be used through it. Bluestacks is a useful way to use it on your PC. Yomitan - A browser-based app that allows you to press Shift to see the meaning of a character on-demand. There's also a Kroll dictionary for this. Chinese Wikisource - A boundless swathe of texts available for free; includes pan-Asian examples. Chinese Text Project - Yet another boundless swathe of texts, often bilingual. Cangjie Input - Via your PC, you can set up Cangjie input via your keyboard options. I strongly recommend doing this unless you have an input method for Chinese that you are already familiar with. Appendix B: Definitions Literary Chinese - A continuation of Classical Chinese as it was used in the First Qin and Zhou dynastic periods of China. Also known as "Literary Sinitic" in some academic spheres. Classical Chinese - The Chinese language as it was written during the First Qin and Zhou periods. Han script The broad set of logographic glyphs originally used to write Chinese languages, but also used in various language families, including Japonic (Japanese/Okinawan), Koreanic (Korean, Jeju), Austroasiatic (Vietnamese), Kra-Dai (Zhuang), and more. Many languages made their own characters to fill in holes in meaning, which we will occasionally detail here. Glyph or Character - An individual combination of brushstrokes made to form a unit of meaning in the Han script; e.g. 吾 "I". Component - A portion of a character made up by brushstrokes that can, itself, be considered a character; e.g. 吾 = 五 + 口. Radical - A component of a character that is used to organise it in a dictionary; e.g. 說 uses 言 on the left and is usually organised using that component.