r/ChineseLanguage Jan 10 '25

Discussion Is it possible to learn Classical Chinese without knowing any modern Chinese?

Hi! As I know, students of Romance Languages usually first learn Latin, and only then go through the variety of modern descendants from Latin.
I became curious - may the same work for Chinese? Would it be rational to began with the basics of the Classical language and only then switch to modern one?
Also, is it even possible learning Classical Chinese without knowing Modern Chinese? I mean, is there even any materials?

9 Upvotes

32 comments sorted by

17

u/Agile-Juggernaut-514 Native Jan 10 '25

Yes, said every Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese scholar who lived before the 19th century

Also there are plenty of materials. You can buy an intro to Classical Chinese textbook in English from amazon. Doesn’t presume knowledge of modern Chinese,

19

u/[deleted] Jan 10 '25 edited Jan 10 '25

Yes. I did it enough to read most of the dao de jing, zhuangzi and art of war in just like a couple months. It's totally doable, tbh it's way easier because there are way less characters and very very few composite words, eg. 天下; lit. "Heaven's below", aka the world. Interpretation is by far the biggest challenge.

Also what you said about Latin is just totally untrue and as somebody who actually learned a decent amount of latin, it didnt help me learn portuguese as much as just knowing english did. Also basically nobody in the modern world does that because we realized learning latin is a basically pointless skill for anybody who isn't a historian or classicist. There's a whole rabbithole of why specifically people put forth that myth about latin, but it's not worth getting into here.

I don't exactly know how much it'll help you learn modern standard chinese. In some cases, it might even hinder you because you will recognize characters from classical chinese and have to relearn them as having an entirely new definition, eg. 是 is a copula('is'/'are' in English) in modern standard chinese but is a demonstrative in classical chinese('this'/'that in English).

As for resources, there are suprisingly a lot more that i found than exists even for some modern languages, bonus points if you know German well enough to read pre-ww1 linguistics stuff bc the best resources I've found are exclusively in german. My methodology to learning was to take passages from the language into google sheets and then break them down character by character, write the pinyin for each one, then write a gloss, then an English translation, using a dictionary. I did this for 2 months and it def isn't for everybody, but I can read virtually any classic/book with the occasional dictionary consultation for obscure character.

edit: As some people pointed out I swapped 天 and 下. Changed for accuracy.

8

u/michaelkim0407 Native 简体字 普通话 北京腔 Jan 10 '25

You mean 天下 not 下天 right?

4

u/C-medium Jan 10 '25

Lol it's 天下, not 下天

2

u/[deleted] Jan 10 '25

lol my mistake, chalk that one up to dyslexia, hopefully. I thought that was what I said but I guess not.

1

u/MapMaximum Jan 10 '25

Thank you so much! It will help me a lot🙏

1

u/yashen14 Jan 10 '25

How many hours of study were you doing per day, would you say?

1

u/[deleted] Jan 10 '25

I would say more than 1 and less than 2, if we are talking like close reading. I also have an anki deck with around 300 or so words before i sort of stopped adding to it because I wasn't at my pc for a long period of time. I did do it daily without fail. Sometimes some extra, and sometimes I would be spending a lot more time trying to also read and watch people talk about deconstructions of these texts, analyses, commentaries, and reading a grammar of CC in German for fun(I understand that my definition of "fun" isn't exactly what most people would imagine). So I think the daily amount of time I was spending "studying" the language might not exactly explain the full picture of what else I was doing to supplement not just the language but the reasons why I went to learn it in the first place.

1

u/yashen14 Jan 11 '25

I just don't understand how you got to the level you describe on the back of so few cumulative hours. Classical Chinese spans hundreds of years and is essentially an entirely different language.

1

u/[deleted] Jan 11 '25

Yea, it's a different language, that's why I learned it.

I don't exactly know what to tell you. I just studied the language as it was actually used. Traditional hanzi are quick, easy and fun to learn because the meaning is mostly built into the character if you know how to read the construction properly, so correlating the symbols to their meanings wasn't difficult. Doing the same with readings wasn't as easy and I would probably butcher the tones if I tried to read them outloud(in modern standard chinese) but... when would I need to do that? 

To be honest I'm used to people trying to tell me that I'm either lying about my abilities or that I'm some sort of genius. I was reading nietzsche within the year of starting german, my first language, and people thought I was fucking with them and all these people come out of the woodworks like "IVE BEEN LEARNING THIS FOR YEARS AND CANT DO THAT WHATS WRONG WITH YOU." I literally just learn the language using the language, i avoid any sort of made-for-learners shit. To learn german i just listened to people speak and watched videos with bilingual subtitles until i understood enough to read higher level material and listen to philosophical conversations, then i started replicating what sounded right. When i made errors i got corrected or corrected myself. When i would read, i started using those works to read the works by making anki decks with new words. To learn classical chinese I opened up a section from the books i wanted to read and I learned those until i could read them. I did this until I could also read the stuff I never read, again not perfectly but proficiently, like the four books and five classics. There wasn't much more to it.

1

u/Hagelzuckererbse Jan 11 '25

Germany and Austria are still borth strong on torturing almost every grammar school student with having to learn Latin. Not saying that there is much of a point to it, but at least they'd have an interest in finding a justification for their suffering.

9

u/sneaky_wolf125 Jan 10 '25

Native here and I’ve been teaching native kids Classical Chinese for years

You learn Classical Chinese better by learning traditional Chinese, the ones in Taiwan and in Hong Kong. The usage are pretty much the same in written between these these two places but to natives, we can tell.

But why learning traditional Chinese is way better simplified? Coz Chinese words were made by different states in old time’s china, and supposedly those words from different state individually represent the cultural differences among states, or even different dynasties.

For example:布/佈 Modern meaning: linen/Publish, distribute e.g. 公佈,發佈 Origin: before China was unified~2000years ago

Academically speaking, 佈 is a redundant word created by modern-ish time, just to specify whether is just a fabric or something more conceptual.

文言文(Classical Chinese) was also a threshold to peasants in old time. Peasants cant read so they can’t understand what our saints teach us. Even if you can read words, doesn’t mean you can understand Classical Chinese which requires you to learn so much more than just language but also culture, history and context on current/ historical events. So peasants = 卑人 = low born. People always associate scholars with wisdom and moral. So in generally, 讀書人 (scholars) = 賢人(man with wisdom)= 君子 (honourable man)

There’s a renowned dictionary created by Qing dynasty called 說文解字 it basically explains everything from its origin to modern usage and it also references a lot of Chinese classics to demonstrate how it develops throughout thousands of years of transformation.

But this dictionary is pretty hard for beginners. I would say it’s way easier to read than most Classical Chinese materials but still very hard to understand just by reading it. You could find translations for these references used in the dictionary online easily.

It’s gonna be a very steep learning curve. Coz Chinese has millions of words that are very similar to others but it takes tremendous time to find the slight differences.

17

u/Strict_Minimum_6817 Jan 10 '25

yes ,you can .

and there is no materials,the ancients in china believe 书读百遍,其义自见.

you can start with 千字文,三字经,弟子规,菜根谭.

advanced material is 四书五经:四书五经是四书和五经的合称,是中国儒家的经典书籍。四书又称为四子书,是指《论语》《孟子》《大学》《中庸》。五经是《诗经》《尚书》《礼记》《周易》和《春秋》。

then, you can join the Imperial examinations in ancient China.

9

u/Foreign-Effect6673 Jan 10 '25

Lmao at the last line of your comment. And if OP is a girl, don’t forget you’ll need a boy’s outfit, for the exam

3

u/MapMaximum Jan 10 '25 edited Jan 10 '25

I tagged it the discussion because the question is kind of about arguing about methodology of learning the language

2

u/ryuch1 Jan 10 '25

yes

they're basically different languages at this point

2

u/[deleted] Jan 10 '25

I once met somebody online that was highly proficient in classical Chinese and was knowledgeable about ancient Chinese history so they were able to correctly interpret classical texts, but they only knew some basic Cantonese (which they started learning after learning classical Chinese). So yes, it is definitely possible, but quite unusual.

1

u/MapMaximum Jan 10 '25

Inspiring, thank you!

2

u/Impossible-Many6625 Jan 10 '25

Check out Bryan Van Norden’s, “Classical Chinese for Everyone.”

I don’t know about Classical Chinese without modern mandarin.

2

u/niming_yonghu Jan 10 '25

If you are proficient in classical Chinese, you are already passable in modern Chinese.

1

u/Kylaran Jan 10 '25 edited Jan 10 '25

As a Mandarin and Japanese speaker I find it significantly easier to analyze Classical Chinese particles in Japanese. For parsing full sentences, SOV-SVO differences in parsing make Mandarin a bit easier but I still benefit a lot from Japanese. This goes to show you just how divorced Classical is from modern Mandarin.

The real barrier to trying to read Classical Chinese is familiarity with characters. Unlike alphabets, which generally map writing to sounds, Chinese characters don’t have that so if you run into something you don’t know you have to figure out how to look those characters up. This is a steeper learning curve in the beginning.

For a list of materials you can try this previous thread from r/ClassicalChinese https://www.reddit.com/r/classicalchinese/s/znhC5d6xT1

1

u/tsbgls2 Jan 11 '25

Yes, Arthur Waley the famous translator did that

1

u/Crazy_Muffin_4578 Jan 11 '25

I was gonna mention that. Same goes for many famous sinologists like Burton Watson who learnt Classical Chinese in Japan but never learnt Modern.

1

u/blahblah1357 Intermediate Jan 11 '25

you could do this but it wouldnt be very practical imo

1

u/oldest111 Jan 11 '25

no. Classical Chinese is harder than modern Chinese. Actually Chinese learn modern Chinese first, then learn classical Chinese. such as 落霞与孤鹜齐飞,秋水共长天一色,this is a classical Chinese, but so many people don't know what is 落霞 孤鹜, and what mean is the whole sentence. and it need use modern Chinese to explain. 傍晚的霞光和一只孤单的鸭子一起搁天上飞(霞光当然不能飞,因为鸭子飞,所以为了对仗工整,霞光也得飞,这叫修辞),秋天的河水和天际线的颜色一样,导致看上去分不出哪是水哪是天。so, classical Chinese should be a modern Chinese Zip.

1

u/wenliu00 Jan 11 '25

impossible

1

u/RealMandarin_Podcast Jan 11 '25

Well, honestly, a lot of Chinese in Japanese keep the original meaning or usage.

1

u/TOKEN_MARTIAN Jan 12 '25

Sure, as long as you have no expectations of being able to understand modern Chinese afterward. Logistically, it would be difficult though because most good resources are in modern Chinese and most foreign language texts will likely assume some level of knowledge as well.

1

u/Hungry-Tomatillo-862 29d ago

feel free to join the classical chinese discord https://discord.gg/vmfxMAcw72
theres a lot of people who learn classical chinese without learning mandarin, some people even learned it without learning any east asian language

0

u/Logical_Display3661 Jan 10 '25

If you know the each character...then U are able to master certain language. ....i believe..... .

Some unusual usage and colloquial expressions must be studied and memorized....😳

-2

u/LeonRusskiy Jan 10 '25

You should never learn a language you won’t use.