Classical Chinese

One of the four classes I took at CET-Harbin was Introduction to Classical Chinese. The class was challenging and taking it greatly improved my Chinese. Classical Chinese is the form of Chinese in which all Chinese literature was written from antiquity until the early 20th century when the written language was modernized and the vernacular became the language of literature. This shift made modern Chinese, the language that is actually spoken, identical to the written language. Without this shift, China would never have attained high rates of literacy, let alone any degree of modernization. However, modern China is a linguistically diverse place, with hundreds of dialects. Before the 20th century, no matter what dialect one spoke at home, everyone who was literate could read the same books. Now, written Chinese is based on Mandarin, so that all Chinese must first learn Mandarin in order to read and write. Some say this has led to the decline of many regional dialects. For a foreign student, learning classical Chinese is learning how to read everything that was written before the 20th century, including thousands of years of poetry, philosophy, and historical documents. However, classical Chinese has left such a strong legacy on the modern language that learning classical Chinese helps with everything from understanding common folk sayings and expressions to being able to read the complex vocabulary of the average Chinese newspaper. Thus, studying classical Chinese is to the student of modern Chinese what studying Latin is to the student of the modern Romance Languages. On the one hand, it allows one a connection with the distant past, while at the same time it deepens one's understanding of the modern language. That being said, Latin was replaced by the vernacular languages of Europe long before similar trends took place in China, so studying classical Chinese is necessary even to read 19th century Chinese literature. Furthermore, classical Chinese differs from modern Chinese primarily in grammar, and is still a form of the Chinese language. It is perfectly possible for a student of Chinese to learn classical Chinese within a year, while a student of English would have to spend many years of effort to truly learn Old English, let alone Latin and Greek.

My major issue with this class was that the first half of the semester we moved too fast. This made it difficult to absorb the material. For many weeks I found myself spending half of my time studying classical Chinese. Later on, the pace slowed to a more reasonable one, but had it been that way from the beginning I think it would have been easier to learn the material. I also felt the class ended up being really only about doing two things: memorizing Chinese folk sayings and translating from classical to modern Chinese. While these two activities were important, I felt the class could have been more interesting and more fun if we had done other things with our classical Chinese, such as read more poetry or even try writing in classical Chinese. I also took issue with the book, which was entirely in traditional characters. This would have been fine in and of itself, but our homework and class work was all done in simplified Chinese. So in addition to translating from classical to modern Chinese, we also had to translate from traditional to simplified Chinese. Furthermore, definitions of words in our texts given in modern Chinese did not always have an English translation, so I spent hours looking up the English translations of modern Chinese translations of our vocabulary in classical Chinese. All of this took away from time we could have used to master classical Chinese.

Nonetheless, I learned a lot in the class and the classical Chinese I learned certainly helped with my other classes.