Customer Reviews

Gateway to the Chinese Classics

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'Gateway to the Chinese Classics' is an excellent introduction for those who wish to get a feel for classical Chinese. It is, however, very much an elementary text, giving the complete beginner a mere taste of the beauty of the language.

The text itself is poorly organised, with one chapter leading on to the next in a progressive manner; it is not at all clear that a given chapter deals with a particular topic, which makes it fairly useless as a reference grammar, a problem compounded by the lack of an index. Despite this failing, the reader who works through the book chapter by chapter will have a good foundation in classical Chinese by the end of the book.

Each chapter generally comprises vocabulary and notes thereupon, grammatical structures, examples thereof, and exercises. One notable omission is answers for the exercises, and not all the passages have a translation provided.

Physically, the book is well printed and bound, the Chinese characters being clear and sufficiently large. There are, however, a fair number of textual errors, albeit minor ones, which detract slightly from the quality of the production.

All in all, this book is an excellent, step-by-step introduction to classical Chinese. However, it is suitable only for those who wish to work through the book from start to finish. It does presuppose some knowledge of Modern Chinese written in the traditional script.

This is an excellent book if you are trying to acquire a better understanding of the Dao De Jing or the Analects. The sub-title says it all: A Practical Guide. This is not a high level academic inquiry into literary Chinese. If you want a degree in ancient Chinese literature, this book is probably not for you. If you just enjoy reading classical Chinese poetry or the classics stated above, I believe you will find this book very helpful.

This book assumes you have a reasonable grasp of basic Chinese and characters. Traditional characters and Pin Yin are used throughout the book. Classical Chinese is complicated and Jeannette Faurot rightly points out that you have to "get a feel" for it. The book uses a vast range of examples and many poems to help you develop your own "feel" for how this language works. Language points are well explained and the cultural notes are informative. The last few chapters start leading you into longer texts. I used it for self-study but I'm sure it would work well in the classroom. Now I truly understand the wisdom of "Dao ke dao fei chang dao".

This book delivers on what its promise of being "A Practical Guide to Literary Chinese." It is by no means a reference grammar, nor does it go into detail about the long (and very interesting) history of Chinese. It does, however, give you a set of graded lessons on wényán. Each lesson including lists of active vocabulary as well as historical and cultural notes to put the writing samples in perspective. The latter are particularly useful since so much of the meaning in classical Chinese texts presupposes knowledge of the culture and the shared world view of the writer and reader.

My main complaint with Faurot's book is the lack of a radical/stroke index for the vocabulary. Each chapter includes a list of vocabulary using Traditional characters with their (contemporary) pinyin readings, sorted alphabetically. When tackling one of the texts, though, having a radical/stroke index for the characters would be a godsend. In her preface she says that the book, "assumes that the student already has an intermediate knowledge of Modern Standard Chinese [...] and knows how to use a Chinese-English dictionary." And sure enough, if you have a dictionary you do not need an index in the book. Nevertheless, an Appendix containing this would have made a good book even better.