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Classical Chinese books in English | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| Paco Senior Member Hong Kong Joined 4279 days ago 145 posts - 251 votes  Speaks: Cantonese* | Message 1 of 2 26 February 2014 at 3:24pm | IP Logged |
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What are the standard books in the English-speaking world for the study of Classical
Chinese and its literature? Or is there anything of high quality you would recommend? Any suggestions of good grammars, readers and translations are welcome. Besides the general enquiry above, I have two particular questions. First, what are the standard English translations of Chinese philosophical texts? (E.g. Buddhist texts, the 4 Books and 5 Classics) Second, I would like your opinion on the following items: 1) An Outline of of Classical Chinese Grammar (Pulleyblank Edwin) 2) A Concise Grammar of Classical Chinese (http://www.invisiblebooks.com/CGCC.htm) 3) 7 volumes of readers and grammar in the Princeton Language Program (Nai-ying Yuan, et al.; http://press.princeton.edu/catalogs/series/plpmc.html) You may have noticed that I am a native Chinese speaker, but I value very highly the aids and insights of scholarship written in other languages, for exmaple, philosophical scholarship such as A. C. Graham's Disputers of the Tao and translations of the Analects and Mencius by D. C. Lau have benefited my understanding of Chinese philosophy immensely. I would like more of those for my own use as well as reference to other people. Thank you! Edited by Paco on 26 February 2014 at 3:46pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| akkadboy Triglot Senior Member France Joined 5410 days ago 264 posts - 497 votes Speaks: French*, English, Yiddish Studies: Latin, Ancient Egyptian, Welsh | Message 2 of 2 26 February 2014 at 4:58pm | IP Logged |
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I have mostly used the following two books :
Dawson R., A New Introduction to Classical Chinese (by far my favorite one) Fuller M. A., An Introduction to Literary Chinese They are very different in structure and approach. Structure Dawson basically consists of several large unadapted extracts that are followed by explanatory notes. Fuller is a lesson-based textbook, each lesson consisting of text(s) (very short at first, they get longer as the lessons go) followed by vocabulary and grammatical explanations. The last lessons have only the text, no vocab, no notes. Fuller has one big problem in my opinion, there's no index enabling you to find the pinyin of a Chinese character. So the pinyin-based index at the end of the book is practically worthless as you have to use a dictionary anyway. Another difference is that Fuller deals with Literary Chinese, which means that he uses texts from the Tang or the Song era, be they prose or poetry, while Dawson limits itself to texts from classics, like Mencius or Sima Qian. Approach But it is in their approach of the language that I have found them very different. Dawson is a pragmatic. You learn by reading texts and grammatical points are explained as they appear. The explanations are simple and made to be directly relevant to the passage you are studying. This means that a complex point can be treated in different notes, with different levels of explanation adressing different shades of meanings. Fuller on the other hand leans more towards a linguistic/theoritical approach. The notes about grammatical points are written in order to give you a broad picture of the meaning and use of the word/structure in question. This leads to the notes not being very helpful at times because you are left to figure how exactly this applies to the text in the lesson. 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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