My path to learning Classical Chinese, also known as literary Chinese, is one that has been going on for several years. Growing up going to Chinese school every week, I’d say I can read the average Chinese book published nowadays without any major problems. Reading books that are written in Classical Chinese, however, is a whole other matter.
My interests in Classical Chinese started from learning about the Four PIllars of Destiny, a traditional Chinese fate calculation technique. However, past a certain point, I realized that many of the classics teaching these methods were written several hundred years ago, with the original book on this topic stretching back all the way to the Song Dynasty. Needless to say, if I wanted to read and understand the text in its original form, I had to learn Classical Chinese.
Of course, there are other reasons to learn Classical Chinese as well. A lot of Chinese philosophical texts were written in literary Chinese. If you are interested in this, I have an article on learning Chinese philosophy. Historical texts such as The Records of the Grand Historian were also written in it. If you want to read the primary sources, you will have to learn it. This might sound cliché, but learning it literally opens up doors if you are interested in Chinese history and philosophy, as you no longer have to depend on modern translations.
How do I learn Classical Chinese though? Through my research there seems to be two ways. Either continuously grinding through progressively older texts, trying to figure out the older grammatical structure and common vocabulary that occurs in the texts, or picking up a textbook on that subject. I later settled on the latter option, and went searching for a textbook.
Considering I live in the West where Chinese books are not easy to find, I eventually settled on a textbook that taught Classical Chinese in English. The textbook was titled An Introduction to Literary Chinese by Michael A. Fuller. If I were able to access a textbook that taught the subject in Chinese, that would have been better, but alas, circumstances did not permit me to do that, so I had to go with the next best option of a textbook written in English.
I then proceeded to read through An Introduction to Literary Chinese, with me rereading some sections several times. While I admit I do not fully understand everything from the book, I’d say I picked up quite a bit of the basics, particularly the grammatical structure and the vocabulary employed in Classical Chinese.
Once I’ve read a large portion of that book, I was able to trudge through Sun Tzu’s Art of War with a dictionary for more obscure characters. There are dictionaries for Classical Chinese specifically, because certain characters can have different definitions in Classical Chinese vs Modern Chinese. For example, the character 走 means “run” in Classical Chinese, but “walk” in Modern Chinese. Interestingly, Japanese seems to have preserved the older definition (“run”) of this character. There is a pretty famous dictionary by Wang Li, a Chinese linguist, which I find helpful from time to time.
By this point, if you pick up the original version of Romance of the Three Kingdoms, you should be able to understand a decent portion of it. After all, it was written in a style that tilts more vernacular mixed with some literary Chinese elements within it. Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, by Pu Songling, however, is still a struggle for me to get through. Hopefully in the future as I improve on my Classical Chinese I will be able to understand all of it.
I’m still learning Classical Chinese, and so this will be a post that I will continuously update in the future as I progress on this journey. Do you have any tips and suggestions? If so, feel free to share in the comments.