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Is LR possible for Classical Chinese?

 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies Post Reply
cypherpunks
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 Message 1 of 8
10 August 2010 at 10:27pm | IP Logged 
Would it be possible to learn Classical Chinese/Literary Chinese using LR? Or would you say it's a purely written language, and that taking an auditory approach is totally ludicrous?

Presumably this means you would have to choose a Chinese dialect for the audio. (E.g. Mandarin or Cantonese, or maybe Hokkien, or maybe even as it's preserved in Vietnamese?)

Has it ever been attempted? How does it compare to how the Chinese themselves study it in school?

There is plenty of audio and written material available online, and I think the sheer amount of available (at least written) material would make it feasible, provided it's possible at all.
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cypherpunks
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 Message 2 of 8
10 August 2010 at 10:30pm | IP Logged 
That should have been: "There is plenty of audio (at librivox) and text material available online"
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johntm93
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 Message 3 of 8
10 August 2010 at 10:44pm | IP Logged 
It's possible, but it'd help to have it transliterated if you weren't great with the characters.

You can take the audio approach just fine. I've seen recordings for learning Latin. Using audio recordings for a dead language is fine afaik, you may not get the pronunciation that was used by the speakers of that language, but that's because we don't know how they pronounced it.
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johntm93
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 Message 4 of 8
10 August 2010 at 10:46pm | IP Logged 
cypherpunks wrote:

There is plenty of audio and written material available online, and I think the sheer amount of available (at least written) material would make it feasible, provided it's possible at all.
The forum software doesn't let new members post links because there's a chance they could be spammers (which I don't think you are), so here are the links for anyone interested
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cypherpunks
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 Message 5 of 8
11 August 2010 at 12:26am | IP Logged 
What about the large number of homophones with distinct characters? E.g. the following characters are all pronounced identically (including tone) in Mandarin, with no or little relation in meaning:

yì: 亦意義易議益異藝憶譯役翼誼億.

This is not the case for Latin, right? I'd hazard to say most of its phonetic differences are preserved in the spelling, and though different from its original pronunciation, the difference between words is mostly preserved.
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johntm93
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 Message 6 of 8
11 August 2010 at 4:14am | IP Logged 
cypherpunks wrote:
What about the large number of homophones with distinct characters? E.g. the following characters are all pronounced identically (including tone) in Mandarin, with no or little relation in meaning:

yì: 亦意義易議益異藝憶譯役翼誼億.

This is not the case for Latin, right? I'd hazard to say most of its phonetic differences are preserved in the spelling, and though different from its original pronunciation, the difference between words is mostly preserved.
I'm not really sure, my experience with Chinese is a few hours of Michel Thomas Mandarin.

I've had 3 years of public school Latin, and can't think of any homophones off the top of my head, but I know there were many words that sounded or were spelled similarly (but not exactly the same), but they normally had similar meanings.
Maybe someone with more Latin experience could answer this better for you.
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luhmann
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 Message 7 of 8
11 August 2010 at 4:34pm | IP Logged 
Classical Chinese is almost impossible to understand when read out loud in Mandarin. One should be able to understand idioms, set phrases or famous quotations, but the language itself would be too obscure to be understood without looking at the characters.

L-R still can be used, but with it with some adaptations. I would suggest you merge the texts into an interlinear translation, and read it while you listen.
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cypherpunks
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 Message 8 of 8
11 August 2010 at 9:23pm | IP Logged 
Yes, I was thinking that perhaps the relentless pacing of audio might be helpful, even if the audio is not comprehensible enough as-is.


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