How Anki Can Help You Read Old Chinese
I’ve been studying Chinese from a variety of approaches since the summer of 2004. I’ve been through some ups and downs in my linguistic journey.
While I’m certainly not the world’s foremost expert on language learning, I’ve learned a thing or two over time. In fact, most of my actual learning has come from unfortunate mistakes I’ve made over the years.
One key lesson I learned a few years back is to always use software like Anki. And here are a few reasons why:
Now, if you’re interested in reading something like Dream of the Red Chamber, or the Confucian classics, or Tang poetry, or even just trying to learn enough cursive script to decipher Chinese calligraphy, you still should use something like Anki.
Here are a few tips I’ve learned over the years for using Anki to study classical (or “old”) Chinese:
Characters change depending on the context.
With tens of thousands of characters to choose from, you’d think that classical authors would refrain from using somewhat unusual characters to write.
You’d be wrong.
In fact, you’ll run into a problem as early as the first sentence of the Confucian Analects:
子曰：「學而時習之，不亦說乎？」
The Master said, “Isn’t learning and applying what you learned at the right time a wonderful thing?”
The problem here is 說, of course. If you’ve learned modern Chinese, you’ll instantly think shuō when you see that character, which means “to say.”
If your Chinese is a bit more advanced, you might think it reads shuì, which means “to persuade.”
The truth, however, is that it reads yuè in this circumstance, and is basically a character that stands in for the character 悅, “to be happy.”
The problem that you’ll have is that this sort of thing happens all the time. It happens with tons of different characters, and it always happens in a way that surprises you.
The best way to deal with it in Anki, in my opinion, is to focus on learning things in context as best as possible. If you run into an unusual reading for a character, you want to learn that reading within its context.
The problem, of course, is that 說 becomes yuè in only a few instances. You don’t want to create a card specifically to teach yourself an unusual reading that only comes up once in a blue moon. The secret is to create cards that require you to read and understand things in the proper context, instead of trying to learn unusual things completely removed from their context.
Break the hard stuff up.
Of course, the exact opposite theory also applies.
While you do want to learn the unusual stuff in the context of the phrase or sentence that you saw it, you also want to stay away from trying to learn extremely long phrases or sentences.
The reason you want to avoid this temptation is because it will make your Anki study sessions unbearable. And, yes, I say this because I’ve got experience doing it the wrong way.
Take the first sentence of Dream of the Red Chamber for example:
作者自云曾歷過一番夢幻之後，故將真事隱去，而借「通靈」說此《石頭記》一書也，故曰「甄士隱」云云。
The author says that, after having had a kind of dreamlike experience, he decided to hide the truth, relying instead on “spiritual communication” to write this book, The Story of the Stone. This is why he used names such as Zhen Shiyin.
Now, if you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you know that there’s a lot of stuff going on here. Phrases like 一番夢幻 (a kind of dreamlike experience), 通靈 (spiritual communication, though this translation is debatable), and the connection between 將真事隱去 and the name 甄士隱 will take you a lot of time to think through.
Because there’s a lot going on here, I strongly recommend against sticking this sentence into your Anki deck.
There are things here you can learn, of course. 云 means “to say” when it’s on its own, for example. 自云 therefore means either to say to oneself or to personally say something. 云云, meanwhile, is a set two character phrase that means “and so on.”
I recommend learning the individual words on their own and leaving it at that. You want to save learning phrases and sentences for instances where there is a certain grammatical usage that you’re interested in learning for whatever reason, or for cases where a sentence or phrase is particularly meaningful for you. Remember that the nice thing about Anki is that you’ll wind up keeping whatever it is you’ve learned in your head over the long term - and it’s kind of funny to see how stuff you’ve memorized tends to spill out at odd times and in odd places.
Learn before you memorize.
This is the part that everybody gets wrong with Anki.
There’s a major temptation out there to try to use Anki to replace your own learning instead of supplementing it. This is what they call incremental reading, and it can work if you do it the right way.
But the last thing you want to do is stick stuff in your Anki deck that you haven’t actually learned before.
Let’s say you’re interested in learning something like this Su Dongpo poem called “Flowering Crabapple” (海棠) that I quoted a few weeks back:
東風裊裊泛崇光， 香霧空濛月轉廊。
只恐夜深花睡去， 故燒高燭照紅妝。
The gentle east wind wafts, casting a radiant light;
A fragrant, misty haze hangs soft as the moon shifts around the veranda.
Fearing only that deep in the night, the blossoms will fall asleep,
I light tall candles to illuminate their rosy beauty.
There’s a lot of interesting stuff going on here - and, if you like the poem, you might be tempted to stick the entire thing into your Anki deck.
Before you do something like that, though, you might want to take a few minutes to actually think about what is going on here.
Su Dongpo turns the crabapple into a person. The personification is obvious in the third line: he describes his fear that the flower will fall asleep deep in the night (只恐夜深花睡去).
In fact, if you think about it, Su Dongpo turns all sorts of things into people. The wind, for example, is described as 裊裊, which means something slender and swaying - almost like it’s a dancer’s sleeve. The flower has a female face that is illuminated by the candle (照紅妝). And the moon turns past the corridor (月轉廊) as if it were a person wandering around outside.
There’s nothing wrong with memorizing the entire poem, of course. However, your appreciation of the art and the imagery here will be enhanced if you take the time to read deeply before you start cramming stuff like this into your Anki deck.
Remember that learning a ton of different stuff as quickly as possible won’t necessarily help you master the language faster. It’s much better to read deliberately and read for understanding and mastery than to try to get through as much as possible as quickly as possible.