A First Course in Literary Chinese

by Harold Shadick

This book is intended to provide a foundation in the grammar of classical Chinese on which the student who plans to specialize in classical studies can build, and to give the student of modern Chinese sufficient knowledge of literary Chinese for his purposes. The material was developed over twenty years for use in the course "Introduction to Classical Chinese," as taught at Cornell University, where students of Chinese history and literature began their study of the literary language after one year of modern Chinese, and students in modern fields after two years. It is therefore assumed that the student can already pronounce Chinese words, use a system of romanization, read and write a few hundred Chinese characters, and understand simple passages of modern Chinese. Volume II of this work consists of vocabularies for all of the texts and exercises in Volume I.

196 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1968

Reviews

[Josh Brett · Rating 4 out of 5]

Shadick wrote this book more than 40 years ago, but hey, most of the content was written more than 2000 years ago, so being up to date is not so much a concern. Despite the frustration of the Wade-Giles transliteration system, Shadick is an excellent introduction to Classical Chinese, beginning with simplistic short stories about illiterate peasants caught in tiger traps and thirsty crows, and moving on to Mencius, Zhuangzi, and Sima Qian. Make sure to get the companion glossary volume, I didn't for several weeks and was quite lost.