Classical Chinese Primer
Introduction

[This page was written while it was thought possible to complete the planned series of Lessons. It is here left unrevised in order to leave the original plan available to any who may later undertake to continue it]

Here are some brief but important orientation suggestions, before you set out on Lesson 1. They apply to later Lessons also, but won't be repeated there. On this page are links to the rest of the orientation material; check it out as you go. It will same time and trouble when you get down to actual learning.

Characters

Written characters are the limiting factor in this language, and writing them is the best way to learn them. Otherwise, Chinese is very easy. Those are the facts in a nutshell.

Get a first idea of character structure from our separate Characters page. Beyond that, learn character writing with a ball pen, a pad of paper, and a copy of Johan Björkstén, Learn to Write Chinese Characters. (Note that clicking on this citation, and similar citations elsewhere in the Primer, will take you to a Works Cited page (in the Reference section of this site), from whose highlighted entries you can order a copy via Amazon, as part of our Warring States Bookshop feature). We will refer to Björkstén simply as B plus a page number in the Lesson and Dictionary notes. It is not well adapted to our classical vocabulary, but it will give the general idea which we need in getting started.

A Chinese character is a word symbol. Learning a character isn't the same as learning a word. You must separately learn the word or words (and there are often several) which that character stands for. You learn those words in the usual way - by familiarization through experience. The characters are an extra level of effort. For help on actual writing, see the Calligraphy page.

Vocabulary Levels

Your character vocabulary is thus not your word vocabulary. But it is a relevant measure of how wide your window of possible word acquisition is, in classical Chinese. How many characters do you have to learn, in order to gain access to most of what goes on in that language? There is an answer to this question, and it is not as big as you may have been told.

What, in general, represents minimum literacy in a language? You can find this out simply by experimenting. Try to read Early English texts of different centuries at sight, coming gradually toward modern times, and you will find that if you can recognize about 90% of the word-units in a text, you will be able to get a consecutive sense of the passage. Below that level, you often lose the thread. Above it, things come more and more sharply into focus: the 95% and 98% levels represent a reasonable command of a wider and wider range of texts. We take these figures - 90%, 95%, and 98% - to be something like a linguistic universal for readers of languages.

It would thus help to know how many characters correspond to those word vocabulary levels in classical Chinese. For the more widely defined Literary Chinese language (which takes in classical and also mediaeval texts), the 90% level is reached with the commonest 900 characters, the 95% level at about 1600 characters, and the 98% level at about 2300 characters. In general terms, this means that the most frequent 5% of the things in an unabridged dictionary are doing about 98% of the linguistic work on a given page. It has proved possible to base a rational three-year course sequence on these most useful characters, using the student's character learning facility only on things of recurring value, and leaving the rest of the language in the dictionary, where it can be looked up when needed. This plan cannot be followed in its simplicity in the present Primer, where the idea is to memorize all texts, including the less frequent words they contain, and so the efficiency of the ideal plan will not be attained. In compensation, our material is narrower in time and thus in content than Literary Chinese, and this gives us a matching gain in efficiency.

In terms of this theoretical background, we here undertake to introduce the first or 90% level of vocabulary access in these lessons. That is why the lessons are called a Primer. At the end of each lesson, we will report the cumulative vocabulary level which you have then reached: the percent of the general Literary Chinese wordstock to which your present character vocabulary gives access. You will be surprised how fast it grows at the beginning. Try not to be discouraged as the learning curve levels off in later lessons, as in the nature of things it will. What we are reading is all basic stuff, and what you are learning is all basic acquaintance. You should always be having fun, and laying a sound foundation for more fun in future.

In learning terms, you will be spending much time at first on the work of character learning. As characters become more familiar, and as your inventory of the commoner characters becomes greater, this will gradually shift to an emphasis of the different work of learning the culture as it can be seen through the medium of the texts. That shift is very natural, and you should welcome it when it appears.

Dictionary

Clicking on a character in a text or any other part of a Lesson will take you to the entry for that character in the Primer's resident Dictionary, where you may see additional examples of usage plus reference to writing instructions in Björkstén (B). Contrariwise, clicking on a citation in the Dictionary will take you to the line of text where a given meaning first appears, or sometimes to extended discussions in the Lesson notes. This feature is meant to save you untold hours of dictionary thumbing, which is how people did the job in olden times. It should become more valuable as the lessons cumulate.

The Dictionary entries are not exhaustive. They would only confuse you if they were. An exhaustive dictionary entry is a very formidable thing. These Dictionary entries are a mere temporary convenience. They are there to get you started. For that reason, you should expect to encounter meanings outside ones given in the Dictionary entries at any moment in your later reading.

As for dictionaries in book form, to have on your desk when you graduate from these lessons to the real unaided world, the ubiquitous Mathews (cited by Mt plus a character number) is, well, ubiquitous. Its type is comfortably large, and it includes a certain number of classical examples (regrettably not marked as such). The more classically focused dictionary of Schuessler, which makes a useful supplement for readers interested especially in the pre-Classical antecedents of Classical Chinese, is unfortunately out of print at this writing.

Pronunciations

Pronunciations in the Primer are given in Mandarin, and the Mandarin is presented in Common Alphabetic spelling. Let us hasten to admit that Mandarin is not only arbitrary, it is wrong. The sounds of classical Chinese were very different. And if we are going to substitute a modern dialect, Cantonese would put us much closer to classical sounds than Mandarin. But Mandarin gives you a commonly available medium to pronounce things in, a medium on which you can probably get pronunciation help from people you know. You will be working without a teacher, and without a roomful of other students, and we have taken account of that fact in using a Mandarin pronunciation.

There is a description of Mandarin sounds, and a link to some tables equating the various romanization systems, at our separate Pronunciation page. Some points at which Mandarin pronunciation is inadequate for philology will be noted in the Lessons. Meanwhile, use it as a medium for memory. Memory is the thing. Before all else, you have to get your mind around the material. This is how.

The Romanized pronunciations below the characters in Lesson texts are linked to Notes on a separate page, explaining the usage of that character in that sentence. If a given pronunciation is not so linked, it means that there is nothing new about that particular usage.

Memory

If your elementary school didn't emphasize memorization, and probably it didn't, you will have some technical catching up to do, to adjust to the procedures which are still common in Oriental traditions.

Learn sentences by saying them out loud repeatedly until you have memorized them, then walk around saying them to the world at large. Musicians will already know that memorization is not the end of the acquaintance process, but its beginning: the point at which you are ready to start internalizing the lesson by repetition. Internalize aggressively. Go up to a brick building and try to bounce an echo off it. This is how it has always been done (young Chinese opera singers use their city wall as an echo site, for practicing). Knowing Chinese is a skill of your throat; it has nothing much to do with your mind.

• Surprised you, didn't we. You were expecting an exclusively visual experience. You were wrong. A dead language is nothing but a living language remote from you in time and space. We breathe life back into it by attaching sounds to it - if necessary arbitrary ones - and moving among its users on that basis. You don't have to compose in it, but you should possess it intimately.

Besides the throat muscles, and the arm muscles into which your knowledge of Chinese characters gradually penetrates, you will also need your mind muscles. This shows up especially when we come to deal with grammar: the way words combine to make a meaning.

Grammar

The grammar of Chinese is easy for those coming from English. There aren't any conjugations to learn, so right at the beginning, you are two years ahead of your friends who are taking up Sanskrit. But you do need to use your mind to understand the grammar patterns. The basic ones (easy stuff like SV = subject + verb) are introduced as they occur in the Lessons. A summary of the terms used in the Lessons is available on our separate Grammar Abbreviations page. A link to that page is given at the bottom of each Lesson page. For general reference, get Pulleyblank, Outline of Classical Chinese Grammar. It is cited in the Dictionary pages as P plus a page number.

Reflection

You have the words with their meanings, and you have the grammar, which organizes the meanings into a statement. Finally, there is a third level of understanding: you have know what the statement means, in its larger cultural context. You will be meeting the most influential voices in the Warring States philosophical and historical tumult. Why are they saying what they are saying? What emergencies of the time are they responding to? Develop your skill of historical inscenation and moral inference. This you cannot do in a vacuum. There is a single page of Background available as part of the Primer, and there are context notes in the Lessons, but you will need more than this, and for it, you will have to go outside. Collateral reading on the period will much enhance your feel for the period, and your ability to ask the right questions about it. We have to add that presently available books on early Chinese thought are somewhat risky for this background purpose, since (dare we suggest) the researches of the Warring States Project are in the process of transforming the assumptions on which nearly all of them rest. But we will simply have to live with those risks. Among general treatments of early thought, Mote's Intellectual Foundations of China is short, intelligent, and has a map on its back cover. But read anything you can get your hands on, leaving it to your own intelligence to notice the problems later on, or else to live with them.

However you approach it, remember that this world is a different world. Classical China never heard of Caesar or Cleopatra, and when it looked up at the sky, it saw different constellations there. Your present sophistication is all to the good, but much of your present cultural knowledge does not apply. Collateral reading will help you adjust.

Rate of Progress

In a class format, with support from other minds and voices to give social reality to the work of learning, each lesson would take about three days (at three or four hours per day). Self-study, including this kind of guided self-study, is different. Even if you have a taste for it (and you will need to), it's lonely work, and it lacks the stimulation of company. Its pace will tend to be slower.

There is a limit to how slow it can be. Retention of material from one lesson to the next demands a certain minimum pace, or else what you have learned will get away from you before you can use it again on something else. Roughly speaking, we recommend that you plan to do one lesson per week. At that rate, the entire course can be completed in about a year. In character terms, that amounts maybe 3 characters a day, on average, with an occasional day off. It's not all that formidable.

Morale

And yet, it is formidable enough. To compensate in part for the difficulties of working in isolation, we offer these suggestions:

• First, you should regard this on-line publication, and the Warring States Project web site at which it resides, as your classroom. Browse around, hang out, listen in, see what is going on. It will help to give you a sense that classical China is something that grown-up people care about, which is a sovereign encouragement.
• Second, beyond that abstract companionship, we offer a Virtual Campus by way of physical inscenation. Here, so to speak, is where these lessons are coming from. Being able to see it may help to give the enterprise greater personal reality.
• Third, if you get stuck, you can always write us (there is a mail link at the bottom of almost every page), and we will see if we can unstick you. It is understood that we are entitled to correct any errors or infelicities in the material which your question reveals to us, and to share with future students in that way any advice we may be able to give you individually.
• Fourth, as the Japanese would say, gambatte. Tough it out. We have done what we could to eliminate gratuitous difficulties, but the real difficulties which remain are sufficient to contribute to character building. Use your inner resources. It is good practice for the future.
• Fifth, following Mencius see 5B8, in compensation for isolation in the present, you can cultivate "friends in antiquity:" the stuff you read will become your company.

We may note in conclusion that the antiquity in question is not after all very alien. The Warring States is a lively period, with many parallels to our own age. Those parallels were not lost on the Chinese reformers of the 19th century, who sought a renewal of the classical spirit in their own time. The Chinese classical age deserves your interest and effort also, as a worthy neighborhood for your mind. Thousands before you have found it so. May this judgement of the ages sustain you in your efforts.

Classical Chinese Primer is Copyright © 2000- by E Bruce and A Taeko Brooks

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