Customer Reviews

Classical Chinese: A Basic Reader in Three Volumes (Princeton Language Program: Modern Chinese)

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

 

 

I'm a self-taught student of Classical Chinese (yes, I know that isn't really possible, but I'm doing it anyway <g>), so this book is a very important resource. What I would hope to see in the second edition is:

1. An index listing of all glossary items in the back of the glossaries volume organized by four-corner lookup order (sijiao) and with Pinyin and Radical indexes.

2. Answers to selected exercises for self-taught students like myself.

3. Less reliance on Modern Chinese. I know it's traditional to study Mandarin first, then move on to Classical, but some oddballs like me are interested in the Classics only, and not modern speech and literature.

4. Princeton is a big university, hire a proofreader. The text is full of glaring typos in English. I'm not qualified to find typos in the Chinese, but even there I've found editing errors.

Even with all these minor flaws, this is an important and valuable book, which is why I gave it five stars, warts and all.

I don't know how many of these people that wrote their reviews for this book actually bought the book at amazon. I bought the book, and found out it's only the TEXT! If you want the real "A Basic Reader in THREE VOLUMES" I suggest you buy it from a third party dealer. I got it from BCD Books at amazon because they actually sell the 3 volumes as one unit. If you want to learn classical chinese, this is what you'll need.

"Classical Chinese: A Basic Reader Text" <- Volume 1
"Classical Chinese: A Basic Reader Glossaries" <- Volume 2
"Classical Chinese: A Basic Reader Analyses" <- Volume 3

The book advertised here on amazon as "Classical Chinese: A Basic Reader in Three Volumes" is ONLY VOLUME ONE, the Text. I don't know why the heck they advertised it the way they did, it is very misleading. Please be warned, don't have simply the text sent to your house and regret x_x like I did and had to buy it again.

I've never seen such a detailed analysis of senteces and structures in any book teaching grammar, which makes it very suitable for a self-learner of this mesmerizing language like myself. Inluded in the glossaries are both english and modern chinese translations, which makes it useful for comparing the classic and modern written language. But there are a couple of problems with this book, including the numerous typos in english, and worse, in the pinyin transcriptions; the bad printing, especially the fonts. The map over ancient map of China is incomprehensible. The glossaries are not totally complete (though if you have a basic understanding of modern chinese this will be no problem); a worse problem is that there's no index to the characters.

All in all, despite its flaws, I would warmly recommend this series.

I used this book in preparation to jump into a more advanced classical Chinese class, and though the explanations it had were very useful (and I must add I am near-fluent in modern Mandarin, so it appealed in that way to me because it helped me understand things in both languages, giving me a backup in case one explanation wasn't thurough enough), I felt that even though I had gone through about 30 chapters, when I went into the other class I felt I had not really been given a challenging set of works to learn from. If you are looking for a simple approach, I would reccomend this book, if you are looking for an ambitious approach, I might look elsewhere.

This set of volumes is the best I have found for someone who wants to study Classical Chinese on his own. The text analysis is very thorough, and offers a great way of becoming familiar with real Chinese sentence structure.
There are no introductory information on how to look up characters, but any character book for beginners will help you become familiar with counting strokes and recognizing radicals in a very short time - this difficulty should not be over-estimated. Actually, the texts are transliterated into PinYin 100%, so you can look up characters by sound even if you do not know how to handle radicals and strokes.
Since this textbook is detailed, it takes time to work through it; on the other hand, if you devote some time to it every day, you will make progress and you do not risk finding yourself outpaced by the book. The only drawback is the three-volume format - you need to have a large desk so you can keep all three volumes (and maybe a notebook and a dictionary) open in front of you! Actually, it would be really good if the quality of the Chinese fonts could be improved too - they are not very crisp, which makes it hard to count strokes sometimes.
There is a companion volume with poetry samples, too. This is again very well done. It contains very little in the way of grammar explanations, but texts and vocabulary are presented in one volume (so this is what I bring with me when I am travelling :-) ).

They sent me the wrong book. A couple of my classmates also recieved the wrong books from this company. As far as I am concered they're chumps.