Customer Reviews

Classical Chinese (Supplement 4): Selections from Philosophical Texts (Princeton Language Program: Modern Chinese)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Through an inductive approach, the authors introduce the beginner to classical Chinese grammar and Chinese culture with a graduated series of enjoyable and important texts. The Basic Reader translates the texts into modern Chinese and English, provides glossaries and analyses with careful, clear parsing, and offers interpretations based on Chinese commentaries. The four supplements include glossaries and interpretations that are less complete than the Basic Reader. For the beginner, their "filtering" of definitions is helpful. The baihua explanations are often useful, but the English suffices for students who do not know baihua. At my intermediate level of study, I find this series more thorough than the texts by Shaddick, Fuller, Syrokomla-Stefanowska, or Chiang, although I also like Chiang's. There are some typos in the Princeton text, but given that Prof. Geiss passed away before the books were finished and that his co-authors are emeriti, presumably getting on in years, it is remarkable that the series is being finished. I look forward to the grammar supplement, which should be useful in conjunction with Pulleybank's book.

It's 2006, we're several volumes into the series, and the authors of this book just couldn't be bothered to proof the English. My Chinese isn't good enough to critique the Hanyu, but the abundance of English typos (even in introductory material!) is a disgrace for an institution like Princeton. Ok, granted, U. of Hawaii is the best US school for Chinese and their books reflect that; but I'm getting tired of writing one review after another of this series of texts pointing out the crude production standards.

No translations of the full text. Limited grammar notes. How is this better than just bringing the texts up in Shuhai Wenyuan on the Web and getting a richer glossary there that is easier to use?

Overall another disappointment, but of enough utility to give it an average rating of three stars out of 5: a C, maybe a C+.