A Practical Guide To Reading The Chinese Classics In Chinese

Advice from years of experimentation

A Practical Guide To Reading The Chinese Classics In Chinese

It’s not easy to learn how to read classic literature in the original languages.

Trust me — I know this from personal experience. There’s a reason why most people prefer to simply trust translators and leave it at that.

But it means something different to you when you read it for yourself. The time and effort you put into learning another language to understand the great works of world literature is absolutely worth it. You’ll find that characters are better defined, descriptions are more vivid, and that the action is much more lively when you’re reading in the original language.

Here are a few brief tips based on my experience learning these language, particularly Classical Chinese. Though these tips are specific to Chinese, I’ve tried to make them applicable to languages in general. And I’ll keep this brief.