Customer Reviews

Classical Chinese Reader

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Syrokomla-Stefanowska's (whew) collection of classic Chinese works is ideal of the beginner's (ie, myself) adventure into the world of Classical Chinese. Topics range from Menscius to Han Feizi to the Great Learning. No previous knowledge of Mandarin or contemporary Chinese is assumed (although it is helpful). Text is supplemented with useful footnotes, and appendices contain grammatical reviews.
My only complaint would be the following: upon introduction of a word, all possible definitions are given, with the most pertinent definition as applies to the given text astrisked by the author. However, as further uses of the word appear in later texts, they are no longer on the vocab list of "new words", and their meaning must be inferred from the list of definitions given in a previous chapter. A positive side to this is, of course, forcing a student to do his own research.

I bought this book because my CHIN 318 class was using it as our textbook. It is a really confusing book to learn and study from. If my professor had not put up the translations and text online, I would not have been able to make heads or tails of what the texts said because it had little room for me to write notes or vocab definitions for the characters.