Did you know you can trade in your old books for an Amazon.co.uk Gift Card to spend on the things you want? Plus, get an extra £5 Gift Certificate when you trade in books worth £10 or more before June 30, 2012. Visit the Books Trade-In Store for more details. |
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
More About the Author
Product Description
Review
"Without question a significant contribution to the field. There is no textbook of this kind available. It provides the student with a comprehensive grammar of classical Chinese with clear and readable explanations in both English and modern Chinese.... The translations are accurate and felicitous." - Catharine Swatek, University of British Columbia; "This Reader addresses a huge gap in Chinese language textbook offerings - that is, a basic introduction to Classical Chinese. It is far superior to previous such works." - Kimberly Basio, Colby College"
Product Description
Classical Chinese: A Basic Reader is the most comprehensive and authoritative textbook on the language, literature, philosophy, history, and religion of premodern China. Rigorously and extensively field-tested and fine-tuned for years in classroom settings by three members of the Chinese Linguistics Project at Princeton University, it sets a new standard for the field.
Volume 1 contains 40 selections from texts written between the fifth century B.C. and the first century A.D., during which the classical Chinese language was fully developed and standardized. These passages, which express key themes in Chinese humor, wit, wisdom, moral conviction, and political ideals, are arranged in the order of complexity of the grammatical patterns they exemplify. Uniquely, each text is translated into both modern Chinese and English. Volume 2 contains a detailed glossary of unfamiliar terms and names found in Volume 1, and Volume 3 features detailed grammatical analyses, in which every sentence in the main texts is fully diagrammed to show the grammatical relations between their various parts.
Four supplementary volumes--an introduction to grammar, readings in poetry and prose, selected historical texts, and selected philosophical texts--will also be available for use in conjunction with the main, three-volume set. There are corresponding exercises for all the reading texts in the Basic Reader and in the supplementary volumes to review and reinforce classroom learning.
With Classical Chinese: A Basic Reader, Naiying Yuan, Haitao Tang, and James Geiss provide the definitive new resource for students and instructors of classical Chinese language or culture, one whose impact will be lasting.
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product)
|
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Having a good time with this set.
Well worth the money.
Having the texts in classical Chinese, modern Chinese, pinyin and English means that you can structure your approach in a variety of ways.
The extensive vocabularies and exercises are a great help and the whole volume functions in many ways as a very considerable reference text.
I'm very happy with this purchase and look forward to adding some of the other volumes when I'm finished with this one.
Well worth the money.
Having the texts in classical Chinese, modern Chinese, pinyin and English means that you can structure your approach in a variety of ways.
The extensive vocabularies and exercises are a great help and the whole volume functions in many ways as a very considerable reference text.
I'm very happy with this purchase and look forward to adding some of the other volumes when I'm finished with this one.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
It's a bit difficult to comment on this one. On the one hand, it's been a great pleasure for me to go through it (have just finished it) and now I really want to pursue studying Classical Chinese. On the other hand, to me this looks like an unfinished work. Here are a little list of pros and cons:
Pros:
-the texts are great, they gradually go from very easy to more difficult, even though it remains fairly basic by the end of the book.
-the separation in three tomes is nice, as I could read the text, then later only look at the vocabulary, and finally the analyses without having a too heavy book.
-in the vocabulary book, every character from the text is listed with the meaning it has in that text. This is particularly convenient as characters in Classical Chinese usually have several meanings, sometimes completely unrelated, and going oneself through a dictionary and guess the appropriate meaning of each character (I've done it, thinking I would not always have a book to tell me which meaning to choose, so as to practice) is of great help.
-grammar is explained as it appears in new texts, and texts reinforce the learning as a new structure is likely to pop-up in the next texts.
-explanations are in Mandarin as well as English. This is very good for learners like me who can speak Chinese, but don't necessarily want to rely only on Chinese (I'm not particularly interested in knowing the grammatical terminology, I want to understand what's going on), as sometimes explanations are pretty long and I would prefer to enjoy more of the text than deciphering what the Chinese means.
-I believe it assumes no knowledge of Mandarin, even though it clearly helps to know some.
Cons:
-the proof-reading is poor. Glaring mistakes are common, be it typos or sentences repeated.
-if the selection of text is great, it mostly follows a selection of texts that's commonly found in many textbooks of this kind..
-the translation process is a bit too long: the sentence is first glossed character by character, then it takes 3 steps of little expansions to reach a proper English translation. Out of those 4, I guess at least 1 intermediate (if not the 2 of them) translations is superfluous, and this could help reduce the size of the book (or adding more texts). Same comment for the fact that all along the book, translations of "X says" take up useless space (after the first lesson you know that it means "X says"...)
-the font for Chinese characters is ugly. The printing is ugly as well, and the layout of the page is not very readable, the same spacing being used between lines and paragraphs.
-the exercises provided at the end of the book do not contain key answers. This is a big problem, because I believe this book was supposed to be for self-learners, and therefore would require key answers. If the book is not intended for self-learners, then the only merit of the book is in displaying a list of vocabulary and the grammatical explanations, as the selection of texts didn't require much effort (many textbooks have almost the same...) and no effort has been made on presentation.
Finally, I would still say I'm happy I've used this book, but I probably wouldn't buy the supplement, as there seems to be other books with better format out there.
Pros:
-the texts are great, they gradually go from very easy to more difficult, even though it remains fairly basic by the end of the book.
-the separation in three tomes is nice, as I could read the text, then later only look at the vocabulary, and finally the analyses without having a too heavy book.
-in the vocabulary book, every character from the text is listed with the meaning it has in that text. This is particularly convenient as characters in Classical Chinese usually have several meanings, sometimes completely unrelated, and going oneself through a dictionary and guess the appropriate meaning of each character (I've done it, thinking I would not always have a book to tell me which meaning to choose, so as to practice) is of great help.
-grammar is explained as it appears in new texts, and texts reinforce the learning as a new structure is likely to pop-up in the next texts.
-explanations are in Mandarin as well as English. This is very good for learners like me who can speak Chinese, but don't necessarily want to rely only on Chinese (I'm not particularly interested in knowing the grammatical terminology, I want to understand what's going on), as sometimes explanations are pretty long and I would prefer to enjoy more of the text than deciphering what the Chinese means.
-I believe it assumes no knowledge of Mandarin, even though it clearly helps to know some.
Cons:
-the proof-reading is poor. Glaring mistakes are common, be it typos or sentences repeated.
-if the selection of text is great, it mostly follows a selection of texts that's commonly found in many textbooks of this kind..
-the translation process is a bit too long: the sentence is first glossed character by character, then it takes 3 steps of little expansions to reach a proper English translation. Out of those 4, I guess at least 1 intermediate (if not the 2 of them) translations is superfluous, and this could help reduce the size of the book (or adding more texts). Same comment for the fact that all along the book, translations of "X says" take up useless space (after the first lesson you know that it means "X says"...)
-the font for Chinese characters is ugly. The printing is ugly as well, and the layout of the page is not very readable, the same spacing being used between lines and paragraphs.
-the exercises provided at the end of the book do not contain key answers. This is a big problem, because I believe this book was supposed to be for self-learners, and therefore would require key answers. If the book is not intended for self-learners, then the only merit of the book is in displaying a list of vocabulary and the grammatical explanations, as the selection of texts didn't require much effort (many textbooks have almost the same...) and no effort has been made on presentation.
Finally, I would still say I'm happy I've used this book, but I probably wouldn't buy the supplement, as there seems to be other books with better format out there.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
6 reviews
23 of 23 people found the following review helpful
Great book, bad proofreading
14 Dec 2004
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
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.
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.
20 of 22 people found the following review helpful
Please Read Before Purchase
19 Sep 2007
Format:Paperback
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.
"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.
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful
Introduction to Wenyan
31 July 2005
Format:Paperback
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.
All in all, despite its flaws, I would warmly recommend this series.
Were these reviews helpful?
Let us know
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
- Books > Languages > By Language > Chinese > Dictionaries
- Books > Languages > By Language > Chinese > Language Readers
- Books > Languages > By Language > Chinese > Learning Materials
- Books > Languages > By Language > Chinese > Level > Introduction
- Books > Reference > Language
- Books > Science & Nature > Earth Sciences & Geography > Education > Kids
- Books > Science & Nature > Earth Sciences & Geography > Education > Teaching Aids
- Books > Science & Nature > Earth Sciences & Geography > Geography > Reference
- Books > Science & Nature > Earth Sciences & Geography > Reference
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
