A New Practical Primer of Literary Chinese

Harvard East Asian Monographs #276

by Paul Rouzer

Forty lessons designed to introduce beginning students to the basic patterns and structures of Classical Chinese are taken from a number of pre-Han and Han texts selected to give students a grounding in exemplary Classical Chinese style. Two additional lessons use texts from later periods to help students appreciate the changes in written Chinese over the centuries.

Each lesson consists of a text, a vocabulary list featuring discussions of meaning and usage, explanations of grammar, and explications of difficult passages. The standard modern Chinese, Japanese, and Korean pronunciations are indicated for each character, making this a learning tool for native speakers of those languages as well.

Appendices give suggestions for further readings, review common and significant words, explain the radical system, and provide Japanese kanbun readings for all the selections. Glossaries of all vocabulary items and pronunciation indexes for modern Chinese and Korean are also included.

Genres: China, Language, Reference, Nonfiction

540 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 2007

Reviews

[Karen Chung · Rating 5 out of 5]

I took about a year to slowly work through Wheelock's Latin, doing a little bit each morning. I'd studied Spanish and French, but hadn't had Latin in high school. I'd audited about a year and a half of Latin at my current university, but didn't do the homework conscientiously and mostly didn't memorize the paradigms, so I ended up with a pretty foggy idea of how Latin works. The Wheelock was a real workout for my brain, but served to clear away a lot of the fog, and I'm very glad I did this. I'm still just a high beginner or low intermediate in Latin, but I can now better deal with random Latin quotes, long as Wiktionary isn't far from reach.

After finishing the Wheelock's I'd thought about doing a Latin II course, but then felt I'd had enough Latin for a while and decided to return to my "roots", i.e. Chinese, my university major and life passion. Some months back, an American friend had recommended this book, so I got it from Amazon. I now had a look at it again, and plunged in.

I'd had a course in Literary Chinese at the University of Minnesota under Prof. Richard Mather - an amazing scholar and teacher - using Harold Shadick's First Course in Literary Chinese. The texts were good, and I really learned and benefited a lot from the book and the course, though the grammatical explanations were extremely opaque and we mostly ignored them. I then went on to take quite a few other courses in ancient Chinese philosophical, historical and other texts, in addition to lots of reading on my own. So I expected a relatively easy review of familiar material.

It turned out that this book stretched my brain much as the Wheelock's did, and gave me much the same feeling while working through it. Interesting that the texts date to about the same time as the Latin texts. I didn't let a single character by, and read modern Chinese translations of many of the texts, to make sure I got everything. I had most already on hand, but I went out and bought a modern Chinese translation of Annals of the Historian (Shi Ji 史記), which I'm now considering reading cover to cover. Both books have 40 lessons, but I did finish this book much faster than the Wheelock's, partly due to the somewhat different structure of the lessons (one single main text per lesson in the Rouzer as opposed to a grammar lesson, invented example sentences, mostly simplified ancient quotes and texts plus notes in the Wheelock), but also having been working on Chinese most of my life certainly helped a lot.

Rouzer's reader is an excellent collection of representative ancient Chinese texts, slowly increasing in difficulty as you move through the book. He provides a full lexical entry for each character when it first appears; you can look up its number in the back of the book if you need to revisit an item. He also includes Japanese and Korean pronunciations of each character (he says he'd even considered adding in Vietnamese pronunciations!), quite a remarkable and elaborate touch. I glanced at them as I read, but had to decide not to pay too much attention to them, or I'd get sucked back into Japanese or even Korean learning, and I wanted to concentrate on Chinese for the time being.

There are modern translations for the first several texts, but none after that. That is the one thing I'd change in this book - all of the texts really should have a modern Chinese translation to refer to. Literary Chinese is difficult, even for a seasoned native speaker scholar, and we just need more help than the vocabulary and notes. Using outside resources took care of this for me, but I expect they will be required for almost anybody who wants to fully understand the texts and not end up feeling uneasy about whether you got it or not. (Personal experience: sometimes the answer will be yes, often no.)

There are a number of minor typos and format glitches, but they are not serious and could be easily fixed.

Huge thanks to the author for this excellent, reader-friendly introductory text. It's greatly enriched my life. And thanks also to Alex Case for telling me about the book...and to Amazon for making it so easy to get!

[Liên]

Very accessible! So happy with how much I can comprehend after working through this.
Wish the 孟子 chapters were shorter. My god I’m so glad I wasn’t born in ancient 东亚.

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

This textbook has forty lessons that serve as the basic introduction to Classical Chinese literature, its patterns and structures, and its grammar and vocabulary; all of which are drawn from varying pre-Han and Han texts.

This textbook eschews the complicated literary interpretations of Classical Chinese and practically teaches the student the basics of the language. Each lesson has alongside the text, ample vocabulary lists (in pinyin, Japanese, English, and Korean), and most importantly exercises to aid the student in mastering the language with sentence drills and translations.

Rouzer has done an excellent job in preparing this textbook and its merit to Chinese students is great, easily enabling them to gain mastery of a richly rewarding language and literary history.

[Jacqueline Mok · Rating 5 out of 5]

Took me one year to work through this. I absolutely cannot say I know, much less am fluent, in classical Chinese yet. But the fault is entirely mine. I found this book to be very structured, and the rate of progression in difficulty did keep me sufficiently engaged. I had to rely quite a bit on other resources to understand the second half of the book though. Trainer wheels in the form of explanatory commentary became scarcer as the book progressed. The practice exercises and answer key in the first half that I found particularly useful were also dropped. Still a very instructive book nonetheless. At some point, I will need to revisit this book again to consolidate everything this has taught me.

[SAHY · Rating 5 out of 5]

incredible textbook with extremely detailed supplemental notes on historical origins of the stories and various possible interpretations of the translations. by diving into the building blocks of modern chinese, it also helped me understand more of the present-day language as well