Learning Classical Chinese

It is possible for you to learn Classical Chinese and more! You can actually read these texts for yourself, though it will take years of practice and the ability to stick with it.

Step 1: Stroke order.

Firstly, you’ve got to learn about Chinese radicals and stroke order so that you can use a dictionary. A calligraphy class is a great way to have fun while you do this, be creative, get the language associated with your body, and as an acupuncturist, it is an advisable art for increasing your needling skill.

You can also start by taking a modern Mandarin series of classes. I took three years worth of these at Portland State University with Dr. Jonathan Pease and Dr. Stephen Wadley. Dr. Pease is educated in Classical Chinese language and enjoys translating poetry from the Song Dynasty. Dr. Wadley specializes in Chinese historical linguistics. If you are in the Portland area, both of these instructors are amazing and I highly recommend them. You can find less expensive language classes at Portland Community College as well as various Chinese language clubs around town.

There are a series of online resources for learning stroke order, as well, including Arch Chinese, but I don’t recommend this type of learning as it is very important to use your hand, with a pen in it, to create the character and start understanding the idea for each stroke. If you are highly opposed to working with an actual teacher (something that will benefit you greatly), then invest in a book and some paper and practice at home. A couple of good books for this are:

Learn to Write Chinese Characters by Bjorksten

Chinese Calligraphy Made Easy: A Structured Course in Creating Beautiful Brush Lettering by Yue

My First Book of Chinese Calligraphy by Olive: In fact, books like this, that are created for children to learn, are often the best resources.

Step 2: Radicals

A radical is an identifiable piece of the character that you can use to look it up in the dictionary. You can choose to look the character up by the stroke order that you learned above (number of strokes and the first stroke) or you can look it up by this radical, and most likely, you will use a combination of both.

Wikipedia offers an online list of Chinese radicals that you can view here.  You’ll see that in modern times, the number of radicals has been reduced to 214. In earlier Chinese dictionaries, there can be as many as 540 radicals used to organize the dictionary. The front of the dictionary will be filled with tables of radicals…meaning that you look under a radical to find a character for which it is a component. For this reason, it’s important for you to memorize the radicals.

Some radicals have standalone meanings. For example, 女 (nǚ) by itself means “woman/female,” but it is also found as a component of a number of characters. There is argument amongst scholars about whether or nor radicals offer purely semantic meaning (they dictate how the character is pronounced) versus their contribution to the etymological meaning of the character. As you translate and interpret the text, you will find that etymology plays a key role in your interpretation of a symbolic character. You will have to decide on this for yourself.

Step 3: Choose a dictionary

Once you’ve gotten stroke order and radicals, you can now look up characters for their meaning. There are a number of dictionaries you can use to do this, though you should attempt to get a dictionary that correlates to the time period that the piece you are translating was written. You cannot use a modern dictionary to translate a Han Dynasty text. It is often hard to find a Chinese-English dictionary for Classical texts. After time, as your skill level increases, you may wish to start using Chinese dictionaries, in which the definitions of the characters are in Chinese as well.

As you look for a Chinese-English dictionary, you also want to be aware that there have been many methods of phoneticizing Chinese language. The most popular of these systems are Pinyin and Wade-Giles. Pinyin is now the official method used. Remember that if you choose a dictionary that is phoneticized with Wade-Giles, you may have to learn an entirely new system for denoting the character pronunciation. This is probably not something you want to do, amidst the already huge project of learning Classical Chinese!

Step 4: Grammar

You’ve gotten as far as looking character meaning up in a dictionary! This is AWESOME! However, now you’ve got to string those characters together and figure out what they mean. This requires that you learn Classical Chinese grammar.

I prefer to begin by translating Classical poetry, which is a little more fluid than some of the prose you will find in medical texts. As you can see from this post, there is a lot of variation in how you can read and interact with such a piece. It is also a 16 character combination, which allows you a great reward for looking up only 16 characters. This is a good way to build self-confidence in translation, as well as work on becoming more cultured. If you’re interested in this, check out:

Chinese Through Poetry by Barnes

Okay…so back to learning the actual grammatical structure. You can start with a class or with a book. Portland State University, mentioned above, offers a Classical Chinese language course every other year. Chinese 311 and 312, Introduction to Literary Chinese. You must take the first three years of modern Mandarin to be eligible for this course. As for books, you can invest in these:

Du’s Handbook of Classical Chinese Grammar by Barnes

A New Practical Primer of Literary Chinese by Rouzer

Outline of Classical Chinese Grammar by Pulleyblank

Step 5: Don’t forget to have fun!

It’s true. Don’t become bored or uninspired or even succumb to that little voice that tells you it’s too hard and you can’t do it. Go out and buy some children’s books in Chinese…many of them even come with CDs that will read the book to you! I’ve got Harry Potter in Chinese as well as Tank Girl comics from Taiwan. Anything from Taiwan is going to be written in traditional characters, which is what you’re trying to learn. If you’re like me, you’ll love reading about Tank Girl kicking some serious ass while drinking beers – and guess what, you’re learning Chinese while you do it!

There is always a way to connect this language with your interests and motivate yourself to learn. It doesn’t have to be boring!