{"id":3807,"date":"2017-06-19T09:00:48","date_gmt":"2017-06-19T01:00:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?p=3807"},"modified":"2017-06-15T21:41:53","modified_gmt":"2017-06-15T13:41:53","slug":"mazanec-on-learning-classical-chinese","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?p=3807","title":{"rendered":"Mazanec on Learning Classical Chinese"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\" <\/a>Tom Mazanec has posted a blog entry about “How and Why to Learn Classical Chinese<\/a>.” He writes:<\/div>\n
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Classical Chinese is an intrinsically interesting language. It refers to the written language of the premodern Chinese tradition and covers a period of some 2500 years (500 BCE~1920 CE) … It served\u00a0 as the shared language of the elites in premodern China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam. Knowledge of classical Chinese opens you up to new worlds. It represents the human experience of something like 1\/5 of the people who ever walked the earth.<\/div>\n
More practically speaking, knowledge of classical Chinese will also greatly improve your modern Chinese. The two are distinct languages (at least, by any meaningful definition of \u201clanguage\u201d), but the modern Chinese languages grew out of their classical ancestor and still bear its imprint. Most of the set phrases (chengyu<\/em> \u6210\u8a9e<\/em>) that mark one\u2019s speech as refined in modern Chinese are summaries of or quotations from classical sources and therefore obey classical structures. Many of the puzzling usages in formal, written Mandarin (the kind used in newspapers) make perfect sense with a basic knowledge of classical Chinese.<\/div>\n
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\u00a0 <\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
In addition, he provides links for recommended learning materials–some of them free–by the likes of David Hawkes, David Knechtges, Edwin Pulleyblank, Mark Edward Lewis, Michael Fuller, Paul Kroll, Paul Rouzer, Richard Mather, Stephen Owen, Zong-qi Cai \u8521\u5b97\u9f4a, and Hugh Stimson, to help with reading classical Chinese poetry and prose (I guess it’s time for some women to publish materials on learning classical Chinese).<\/div>\n
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Click the image above to link to the entry.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tom Mazanec has posted a blog entry about “How and Why to Learn Classical Chinese.” He writes: Classical Chinese is an intrinsically interesting language. It refers to the written language of the premodern Chinese tradition and covers a period of … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[3],"tags":[457,1443,1873,1412,1874,1657,1441,1743,1875,393,1448,1223],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8srwF-Zp","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":2748,"url":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?p=2748","url_meta":{"origin":3807,"position":0},"title":"A Student’s Dictionary of Classical and Medieval Chinese","author":"Lucas Klein","date":"August 21, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"Forthcoming from Brill, A Student's Dictionary of Classical and Medieval Chinese, edited by Paul W. Kroll with William G. Boltz, David R. Knechtges, Y. Edmund Lien, Antje Richter, Matthias L. Richter, & Ding Xiang Warner. From the press description: A Student\u2019s Dictionary of Classical and Medieval Chinese is the long-desired\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Links"","block_context":{"text":"Links","link":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?cat=3"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3569,"url":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?p=3569","url_meta":{"origin":3807,"position":1},"title":"Mazanec on Rouzer’s Hanshan Translations","author":"Lucas Klein","date":"November 2, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"Tom Mazanec has posted about Paul Rouzer's new translation of Hanshan \u5bd2\u5c71 (Cold Mountain) for de Gruyter's Library of Chinese Humanities--now available for sale and free download. As Tom notes, some of the Hanshan corpus was \"famously translated by Gary Snyder in 1958 [and] later celebrated by Jack Kerouac in\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Links"","block_context":{"text":"Links","link":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?cat=3"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.degruyter.com\/doc\/cover\/9781501501913.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":3390,"url":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?p=3390","url_meta":{"origin":3807,"position":2},"title":"Owen’s Complete Poetry of Du Fu","author":"Lucas Klein","date":"January 25, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"The Poetry of Du Fu \u675c\u752b, edited and translated by Stephen Owen, is now available from the Library of Chinese Humanities (a new venture started by Owen and Paul Kroll and edited by them and Sarah Allen, Christopher Nugent, Anna Shields, Xiaofei Tian, and Ding Xiang Warner). It is not\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Links"","block_context":{"text":"Links","link":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?cat=3"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.degruyter.com\/doc\/cover\/9781501501890.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":4699,"url":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?p=4699","url_meta":{"origin":3807,"position":3},"title":"Butler reviews Hinton’s Classical Chinese Poetry","author":"Lucas Klein","date":"December 4, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"John Butler on new books by David Hinton Writing in the Asian Review of Books, John Butler reviews two new books by David Hinton, Awakened Cosmos: The Mind of Classical Chinese Poetry, David Hinton (Shambhala, 2019) and The Selected Poems of Tu Fu, Expanded and Newly Translated, (New Directions, 2020).\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Links"","block_context":{"text":"Links","link":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?cat=3"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2801,"url":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?p=2801","url_meta":{"origin":3807,"position":4},"title":"Omniglot Seminar: Cosmologies of the Classical with Chloe Garcia Roberts & David Hinton","author":"Lucas Klein","date":"September 22, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"David Hinton, author of Mountain Home and\u00a0translator of Chinese poets including\u00a0Wang Wei \u738b\u7dad, Hsieh Ling-Y\u00fcn \u8b1d\u9748\u904b, and Bei Dao \u5317\u5cf6, joins Chloe Garcia Roberts, translator of\u00a0Derangements of My Contemporaries\u00a0by Li Shangyin \u674e\u5546\u96b1. They will discuss their individual approaches to classical poetries and cosmologies, while exploring the influence of classical Chinese\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Links"","block_context":{"text":"Links","link":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?cat=3"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2967,"url":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?p=2967","url_meta":{"origin":3807,"position":5},"title":"Kroll’s Introduction to Dictionary of Classical and Medieval Chinese","author":"Lucas Klein","date":"February 2, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"Brill has released Paul Kroll's Student's Dictionary of Classical and Medieval Chinese, with a plugin also available for Pleco. The introduction is also available online--here's an excerpt: The three determining factors in making sense of any text are grammar, context, and vocabulary. That order reflects the relative importance of these\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Links"","block_context":{"text":"Links","link":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/?cat=3"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3807"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3807"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3807\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3812,"href":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3807\/revisions\/3812"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3807"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3807"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xichuanpoetry.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3807"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}