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Two days ago, in "Difficult languages and easy languages, part 2" (5/28/19), we listed scores of languages from easiest to hardest to learn. Spanish came out overall as the easiest widely spoken language for many people to learn, while Arabic and Turkish struck many people as quite difficult to master.

If you want to experience a language learning task that is really and truly daunting, give Literary Sinitic (LS) / Classical Chinese (CC) a whirl. To me it is far more challenging than Sanskrit or Classical Greek or Latin. With their moods, tenses, gender, number, conjugations, declensions, paradigms, and whatnot, learning these languages is most assuredly tremendously demanding, but they cannot begin to compare with the humiliating experience of trying to make sense of a passage in LS when its subject is not explicit, the time when it happened is not clear, and all you know is a succession of uninflected morphemes interspersed with some often highly ambiguous particles that may indicate more or less pertinent relationships among the morphemes.

I remember how I began the learning of Sanskrit. We started with Perry's Primer to pick up the basic grammar and core vocabulary. Having mastered the foundations and clutching Whitney's Grammar and a good dictionary (I was attached to Monier Monier-Williams), you jump right into real texts. For me it was Lanman's Reader, starting with Mahābhārata, then Hitopadeśa and Kathāsaritsāgara, and off we went. It was hard, but if you were conscientious it was doable. It was all very precise and explicit, so long as you knew the rules.



With LS it is different. To comprehend a LS text, you have to possess immense learning and uncanny intuition, or else you just memorize it and rely on your teacher's explication of the meaning. To understand LS well, you have to read vast amounts of it. It's similar to learning how to write Chinese characters: practice practice practice!

I've been teaching First-year Classical Chinese for forty years, and I love to do it. Everybody who comes knows that I spend the first few days dissuading those who are not genuinely serious about the class from taking it. I tell them this will be the hardest class they have ever taken, and it is (except perhaps for organic chemistry). Those who stay the course usually receive an A or A-, seldom a B+, B, or B-. Occasionally I have to give a C, D, or alas, an F, when the poor student really wants to learn LS but just cannot do it. Some of them take it a second time, but it still doesn't sink in. They just don't have what it takes.



Usually the students work together to prepare for the daily recitations.

Those who stick with it have a mind-blowing / bending / altering / expanding experience. They discover different dimensions of thinking (nooks and crannies of the brain) that they never knew existed. Even though I've been going through the beginning stages of learning to read LS / CC with a new batch of students in the fall semester for four decades (it's a two semester course), every year it's just as exhilarating as it was the first time. I never get tired of bringing these ancient, dead texts alive for the students.

By the way, I still use Harold Shadick's A First Course in Literary Chinese (originally from the University Press of Cornell, where he taught), even though it's been out of print for decades, uses Wade-Giles Romanization, and is built upon a linguistically daunting apparatus, because its three big volumes provide the best selection of texts with vocabulary notes, commentaries, and systematic grammar. If Bryan Van Norden's Classical Chinese for Everyone: A Guide for Absolute Beginners (Hackett) comes out in time later this year, I may give the students a spin through it first before diving into Shadick, or I may just assign it as supplementary reading throughout the year.



Oh, incidentally, unlike almost all other courses of LS / CC across the country, there are no prerequisites for my course, and students may pronounce the characters in Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, etc.



Question:

“Which is harder: Western classical languages or Chinese? ” (3/6/16)

Answer:

Chinese.

Selected readings

"Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard" (8/91)

"How to teach Literary Sinitic / Classical Chinese" (9/6/18)

"Aphantasia — absence of the mind’s eye" (3/24/17)

"The miracle of reading and writing Chinese characters" (3/26/17)

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