Classical Chinese: A Functional Approach Paperback – Import, 1 June 2008

I like the functional approach that this book uses to teach Classical Chinese and it does a great job of explaining and giving examples of how grammatical functions work. There is a glossary at the back with characters used throughout the book and if you forget what a character means, you can reference the glossary and it'll point to example(s) of how the book uses it to give you better context. My only gripe with this book is that it's published with simplified Chinese characters. Classical Chinese is pretty much a dead language in the 21st century so the vast majority of the literary corpus will be from a time where simplified characters didn't exist and it would make more sense if this book used traditional characters instead. Technically, there is a traditional characters version of this book. Unfortunately, it is out of print.

this is a great tool for learning wenyan. that said, i do need to mention that three years of modern chinese is a prerequisite for using this book. the authors explicitly state this and they point out that this book tries to emphasize the connection between the modern written language and wenyan. formal written chinese, whose sentence structure and stock phrases often directly borrow classical usage, serves as a bridge, and it is in this register that translations into modern chinese are given. my personal feeling is that three years of chinese may not be completely adequate, since most chinese as a foreign language courses emphasize conversational skill and colloquial speech over formal written communication. (at harvard, for instance, formal written chinese is officially a fifth-year chinese course.)thus, the biggest problem that a foreign learner of classical chinese using this textbook is likely to encounter is that while classical words are glossed in both modern chinese and english, translations of example sentences are *only* given in chinese. other than that, this work has a good balance between providing well-chosen examples for the systematic introduction of vocabulary and sentence structure (with an emphasis on frequently encountered function words) and reading passages which ask students to comprehend longer texts. therefore, it serves well as both a reference/refresher as well as a textbook for the uninitiated.all passages have "answers" in the back, and the index of vocabulary is quite extensive and well done.as a plus, the famous calligrapher qi gong (a descendant of the yongzhen emperor) rendered the chinese title on the front cover.

This book is probably different from most of the Classical Chinese textbooks on Amazon in that it translates Classical Chinese into Modern Chinese in the examples and exercises but not into English, which is fine if you are an intermediate or advanced learner of Chinese but would be problematic for beginners. At first I was irritated that Amazon doesn't seem to have the simplified character version of the book but after thinking about it, I realized that most of the Classical Chinese you encounter will probably be on paintings or scrolls and will be in traditional not simplified characters. The book has a good answer key in the back and uses texts from the Spring/Autumn period all the way to the 20th century, which is a pretty impressive range. I've just finished Chapter 1 and I'm not sure if I like translating from Classical into Modern Chinese in the exercises yet, which is why I'm giving this three instead of four stars. But it seems better than some of the Classical Chinese books I've tried (Dawson) and the dictionary lookup of characters required has been minimal.Update: After having gotten into Chapter 4, I'm realizing the advantages of the translation into Modern Chinese as my next step will probably to get a Chinese language edition of Confucius' Analects with a Modern Chinese translation. So if you want to move beyond English language textbooks, this book is really helpful. The main challenge is not so much the grammatical particles in Classical Chinese but filling in the missing context and this book is helpful with that. I can get through a sentence a day and find I need to rely on the book's translation heavily to make sense of anything and I've been studying Modern Chinese for years. One of the real advantages of the book is that every sentence is translated, even in the exercises, as opposed to other books where this is not the case.

I like the authors approach and think it works for me.Grammatical concepts are introduced step by step, and for each of them we have lots of example to learn from. There are also small texts in the end of each lesson to review your knowledge. I also like that the connection between Classical and Modern language is made obvious.However, the obvious downside is that you need have a good understanding of written Modern Chinese, especially since the translations are quite formal (to be close enough to original) and there are no English translations for examples. I have a long time experience in written Japanese and several years of Modern Chinese, and it's still difficult for me sometimes to read them.I still give this book five stars, just because I like it more than alternatives. It works for me, but will it work for you?

The book is not in perfect condition.