cophnia61 Wrote:Man, the last post is from 5 years ago!

<Starts to feel stupid> I think I searched for "laddering" and didn't notice the timestamps... But worth it for the fascinating update!!!

bflatnine Wrote:Woah, talk about a blast from the past. I'm still here though.

... I've written several research papers in Chinese, given presentations in Chinese, and translated everything from annual financial reports to journal articles in psychology. My Chinese is now at a very high professional level, and my classical Chinese is nearly as good as most college-educated Taiwanese people (except those who majored in Chinese lit, of course).

Congratulations on blazing your own trail, and achieving so much scholarly advancement without the impecunious life of a student!

What would I search for to find your Chinese research papers (presumably in paleography?)?

Did you go from your low-intermediate-ish status (as of 2009) to fluency in vernacular and classical in <7 years then?

Can you speak about your experiences with learning the language of the Song, Tang, Han, and pre-Han, and which of these comes under your rubric of "classical" (if any---Yuan? Ming?)?

Am I correct in understanding that college-educated Taiwanese are able to read classical but not necessarily know how to sound it, phonetic reconstruction being so difficult? And would you say that such college-educated Taiwanese are able to read any work that was composed in the classical era, or is it the case that they can only read the authors and writings that they've studied (kind of like in the US, educated people might understand Shakespeare plays they've studied in class, but would be lost when trying to understand one they haven't studied)?

Sorry for the barrage of questions, feel free to tell me to bother someone else for the answers.

bflatnine Wrote:I'll really buckle down with it once I get there. I won't be attending a language school this time, at least not at first. I'll be learning on my own, with tutors, and by talking with people in my neighborhood.

Blog? Twitter? Sorry, greedy

I haven't published anything yet, just a first year MA student.

My "low intermediate" in 2009 was actually more of an advanced beginner in retrospect. Not much difference, but hey.

I think you're confusing being able to read classical/literary/whatever Chinese with phonetic reconstruction. The vast, vast majority of people read literary Chinese using Mandarin pronunciation, some in their own native dialect (though this is becoming more and more rare), and only a very few specialists read it in reconstructed Middle or Old Chinese pronunciation (and even then, only sometimes).

Generally, classical refers to the Zhou period through the Han Dynasty, with literary Chinese being anything after that (also a bit of a misnomer, but what can you do?). I'm more comfortable with the classical period, particularly the Warring States through the Han, than I am with later periods (Qing dynasty being an exception since it's so close to modern formal Chinese), but I can hold my own in other periods as long as it's not something too esoteric.

As far as how I learned it, I started with Michael Fuller's An Introduction to Literary Chinese on the side of my classwork at the language center. I got through most of that book within about 6 months, then started a Literary Chinese reading group with a few other foreigners here in Taipei (still ongoing, if anyone's interested). We read a lot from 古文觀止 and other texts, taking turns selecting them so there was a lot of variety. Then spending a year in the Chinese department helped a lot, too.

Most Taiwanese people can make sense of texts they haven't read, but they might not fully understand them. Of course, it depends on the difficulty of the text, the time period, etc. Most people have a harder time with pre-Han texts than they do with post-Han ones, but again, it depends. There's such huge variation in the texts that fall under the umbrella of 文言文 that it's hard to say.

I don't mind answering questions, no worries.

I have a blog about my experience learning Chinese. I haven't decided whether I'll keep one about Japanese yet. As I mentioned, I'm helping to develop a new method of learning Chinese characters, and we're hoping to do an edition for Japanese learners later, so I'll definitely be posting about that here when it happens.