General Literary Chinese from Scratch/Introduction

About this Book This book is not the same as Classical Chinese, which is aimed at teaching the language spoken by Confucius and Zhuang Zhou during the peak of the classical period. This book teaches how that language was used by individuals across multiple countries. It makes no assumptions about your knowledge: You can be a person like me - a westerner who simply loves the language - or anyone else. I will also not assume you have linguistic knowledge; I will avoid using it where I can, but direct you to the linguistic term if you wish to use it. This book respects your intelligence. The book is organised into Units as if this were a course, using principles taken from Teaching English as a Foreign Language. We will go through several stages of comprehension; from simply understanding the Han script as an entity, to general-purpose comprehension. Skimming, scanning, and extensive reading skills will be trained. You will not be completely fluent in reading this language solely from this text, but it will serve as a guiding hand. I will provide texts for you to optionally read alongside this book from Wikisource. The reason this book is being made is that the standard Literary Chinese curriculum is extremely impoverished. Most materials focus heavily on Zhou-Qin texts and, due to the small corpus, get railroaded into forcing students to learn lengthy, difficult passages right from the get-go. Numerous textbooks, both English and Chinese, are like this. It does not have to be this way and these faulty curricula usually come from either a lack of materials management, a need to adhere to a broader philosophy curriculum, or both. This book hopes to rectify this wrong by drawing upon the entire Sinosphere for resources instead, whilst still preserving the classics and the good parts of the methodology used in contemporary textbooks. In doing so, the book hopes to give you a broader historical understanding of the Literary Chinese tradition and how it was adopted into these different cultures, which is essential for the context this language requires to be readily understood. Drawing upon contemporary TEFL considerations for literature, I introduce a "buffet" approach with the gathered materials: In other words, I raise many "mini-units" that draw upon literature from broad themes. These aim to showcase culture and genre, two major "nodes" of Literary Chinese discourse. Difficulty will increase according to theme, but they will all follow a similar path of shorter excerpts first, to lengthy texts at the end. The broader syllabus is centralised around scaffolded vocabulary: Each text will naturally lead into the next, and you will be expected to remember vocabulary from each unit. This does come with some changes to how Literary Chinese is taught, though: For example, Zhuangzi is often taught early due to his unbelievable influence on Sinitic thought. However, his texts are incredibly dense and use poetry, which naturally requires the concepts of argumentation and poetry being showcased first. This scaffolded approach hopes to make it so that Zhuangzi and other philosophers can be read comfortably through pacing the learning curve, allowing him and similar major figures to be understood with full appreciation. We will be using Traditional Chinese in this book. However, there are regional variants within this, and content from the People's Republic of China may insist on Simplified Chinese, which was a reform in the 1940s that standardised common handwritten variants. This book has no horse in the race of which standardised system is best: Use what you want, and what is best, for your writing. Therefore, lessons will be structured like so: Lead-In: Small nuggets of knowledge that will set the context. Pre-Reading: An explanation of patterns and characters that will be important for reading. Text: What we are hoping to read Gloss: Glosses to relevant vocabulary. Explanation: An explanation of the characters and patterns within. Exercises: Questions to answer for yourself. Similar texts For example...一武曰木 One thing (is) called a tree (explanation...)And glorious etcetera! It should be noted that a translation will never be outright given to you. The expectation is that you come out of these lessons with the ability to interpret a text for yourself. There are translation tools online, and these are acceptable, but the opportunity for that first interpretation must exist for your personal development. On Phonology Literary Chinese itself has no phonology. Therefore, rather than prescribe you a new phonology to learn, I will be giving you the Cangjie Input Method combinations, which targets the structure of the characters instead. However, this is not to say the language was not spoken: It was, and is, recited, especially in poetry. Therefore, should you be interested in recitals and the like (and they are wonderful!), I strongly recommend you use a tool to view the phoneticization for what we can call your reading language. I personally recommend Yomitan for this, which allows you to press Shift to view it instantly. This text will present poetry in the modern phonology of the country a text is from. If it is Japanese poetry, it will be in Sino-Japanese. If it is in Chinese, it will be in Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese. So on, so forth. What is Literary Chinese? Literary Chinese is the "scripta franca" used across East Asia until around the 20th Century. It is still sporadically used today in traditional Chinese and Japanese poetry, Taiwanese law, and classically-inclined literature, but enjoyed broad usage prior to 1917, when the New Culture Movement led by Hu Shi 胡適 finally put an end to it. The CJKVZ family of characters shows that the Han script was used in a wide variety of environments. It is not just China and Japan! It has been used in Korea, Vietnam, the Ryukyu Kingdom, Singapore, and even Malaysia! By accessing this language, you can read historical literature from any of these countries. It is not simply a pan-Asian language, though: It is also diachronic, having vocabulary loaned and forgotten over the years. It is something of a moving target: Texts written in 5th Century Japan will be very similar to those written in 10th Century Vietnam, though each nation may write a given character differently, but the underlying syntax will be identical. Literary Chinese is filled with boundless genres, such as... Confucianism Daoism Buddhism Poetry Law Politics Government Philosophy Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) History Military affairs Tea culture Ethics and morals Education theory Travel logs Christianity Lexicography (creation of dictionaries) Encyclopaediae Art history Literary criticism & commentary Academia And so, so, so much more! It is the language used by the literati of yesteryear for thousands of years. The tradition is a leviathan that is hard to fully grasp and appreciate even as one grows in experience. One could say you grow with this language. I will make something clear: Literary Chinese is by no means a strict Han institution. It is a massively diverse language that has been used by people of many ethnicities, and these people will all be given voices in this book. Each of these people had different cultures, values, and motivations for using this language. Jurchens and their Manchu successors used the language to claim Han lineage; Tangut peoples used it to differentiate themselves from Han Chinese; Japanese people used it to supplement their at-the-time unwritten tongue. These motivations all present unique challenges: Noticing these occurrences is essential. However, it is not sunshine and rainbows: Manchuria used Literary Chinese for law and edicts to assist in Japanese colonisation of northern China, and the Mongols used it when committing genocide against the Western Xia. It is a language of power, and some would use it to speak to that power: Consort Dasese used the language against the Khitan Emperor Taizuo of Liao when his complacence led to his downfall. This textbook hopes to synthesise and marry these concepts, to show Literary Chinese as it actually functioned. What this book is not This book is a modern take on how to read and write Literary Chinese. Therefore, this book is not: An introduction to Chinese linguistics: Chinese linguistics (or as I like to call it, sinolinguistics) is a complex and wholly separate topic to Literary Chinese. You do not need to be a linguist to write or read Literary Chinese, lord knows readers over the past 1,200 years were not. A reconstruction of Old Chinese: Old Chinese is useful to inform one's understanding of the classics, and will be cited occasionally, but it is not important for reading Literary Chinese. A book on historical linguistics: Historical linguistics, again, is useful, and will be cited, but you will not come away with a broad understanding of this topic. A palaeography book: Character variants and historical forms of Han characters may be used, but I will not be teaching you how to conduct paleography. They are reference points to help you understand where characters came from and why they look the way they do. There are numerous resources on these topics, particularly by scholars like Ferdinand de Saussure, Edwin G. Pulleyblank, and William H. Baxter. Therefore, anything I say on these topics should be taken as vehicles and lenses for learning the language, not as something super academic. Language and linguistics are separate topics. Conclusion By the end of this book, I will ensure you can read anything from a deeply personal account of a Daimyo's life when Japan was in its infancy, all the way to World War I as it happened in the eyes of someone from Vietnam. You will be able to get trapped in this sprawling labyrinth and slowly improve at whatever specialisation you're looking for. Sound awesome? Then let's dive in!