An Introduction to Literary Chinese

Harvard East Asian Monographs #176

by Michael A. Fuller

This textbook for beginning students contains 35 lessons of increasing difficulty designed to introduce students to the basic patterns of Classical Chinese and to provide practice in reading a variety of texts. The lessons are structured to encourage students to do more work with dictionaries and other references as they progress through the book. The Introduction provides an overview of the grammar of Literary Chinese. Part I presents eight lessons on sentence structure, parts of speech, verbs, and negatives. Part II consists of sixteen intermediate-level lessons, and Part III offers five advanced-level selections. Part IV has six lessons based on Tang and Song dynasty prose and poetry.

Genres: China, Nonfiction, Language, Linguistics, Classics, Textbooks

392 pages, Paperback

First published May 25, 1999

Reviews

[Wing · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a native Cantonese speaker and having received Chinese lessons in British Hong Kong (and scored a distinction in Chinese in its school leaving examination), I bought this book to brush up my rudimentary Classical Chinese. Naturally, I find it easy to follow and it does satisfy my needs. I suppose it will serve a good textbook for courses on this topic. However, it probably is not ideal for an autodidact. The most difficult texts are without explanatory notes. Welcomingly, there’s a glossary of functional words and this is very valuable and illuminating. Classical Chinese is all about rhetorical styles, modal arguments, allusions, and parsimony. Professor Fuller explains clearly the importance of contexts and hermeneutics. Mere syntactical analysis is not enough. Five stars.