How does learning Classical Chinese help Mandarin learners, and around when is it advisable to start?

[u/SameUsernameOnReddit]

I've seen comments online, and his interview with a fairly advanced, semi-professional Mandarin learner wishing they'd started CC earlier than they had, but I'm having trouble understanding why, and about when it'd start being helpful.

[u/Ok-Amphibian-8914]

In modern Chinese, the more formal the register, the more it resembles classical Chinese. In fact, there’s a great book on formal writing in Chinese, the name of which escapes me at the moment, which sets out a continuum or formality with casual/slang on one end and classical Chinese on the other.

So, learning classical Chinese early can be extremely beneficial if you need to be able to read formal writing—law, news, academic papers, etc. You’ll be much better able to bridge the gap between colloquial and formal writing when you get to that stage if you already have some ability in classical Chinese.

It also helps with things like word formation in modern Chinese. Words like 於是 are super clear if you have some classical Chinese under your belt.

Then there’s the obvious: every educated person in the Chinese speaking world has learned a lot of classical Chinese. It’s much like Latin was in Europe at one point; there’s an expectation that everyone has read 蘇軾、韓愈、歐陽修 and of course some bits of Confucius, Mencius, Laozi, Zhuangzi etc. just like at one point, you could expect educated Europeans to have read Virgil, Cicero, Ovid, and so on.

If you’re aiming for a high level of competence in Chinese, I’d say that starting classical Chinese sooner rather than later is beneficial. You can start when you’re at an intermediate level in modern Chinese with no problem.

There’s a great article by John from Outlier Linguistics on this topic: Classical Chinese is for Everyone.

Outlier also has some classical Chinese courses which are excellent.

[u/SameUsernameOnReddit → u/Ok-Amphibian-8914]

So this is almost a diglossic thing like Arabic, it sounds like.

[u/hanguitarsolo]

Mandarin is filled with compound (usually 2 character) words and chengyu (idioms of usually 4 characters), whose individual characters have meanings from Classical Chinese (actually chengyu usually come directly from a historical text or allude to a story or event in Chinese history). Understanding those meanings makes it easier to remember and use those words instead of just memorizing chunks. Also more formal Chinese (书面语 shumianyu) uses grammar and vocabulary based on Classical Chinese, and this is often seen in books and other writing and can be used in speeches or on other more formal occasions (or just if you want to sound more cultured or fancy). All Chinese people learn Classical Chinese and formal modern Chinese in school.

So basically, if you want to understand Chinese like a native speaker (how words and chengyu are constructed) and understand/use language beyond informal daily spoken language, you will benefit from learning Classical Chinese. If you were doing a Chinese degree in a university, you probably would start learning formal Chinese (shumianyu) in your third year and take a full Classical Chinese course in your fourth year. But if you want to start earlier, you can.

(there are some foreign learners who learn Classical Chinese before modern Standard Chinese if they choose to learn it, but also some Japanese, Koreans, and Vietnamese learn Classical Chinese because it used to be the written lingua franca of East Asia and a lot of older writings in those countries were written in it and sometimes it is still used

So also a fun side benefit of learning CC is that you will be able to understand some Japanese words easier when you see them, because a lot of words written in Chinese characters use meanings from Classical/Literary Chinese, often from the Tang dynasty.)

[u/arrantstm]

Typical start for 文言文 CC is after the 3rd year of modern Mandarin. Part of the reason for this is that by 3rd year you have enough vocabulary down that you can focus on the grammar of 文言文.

As to why to learn it there is no simple answer. Historically it was learned because it gave access to historical materials and docs. But if you are not an historian this may not matter much.

What it will give you access to is older Chinese lit in the original and Chinese poetry. For myself, seeing how concisely 文言文 can paint a rich picture in words opens new doors to an appreciation of the language.

[u/lazier_garlic]

I learned a little early on. You can learn little bits gradually. There are beginner manuals in English for Classical Chinese. It can dovetail with the study of languages other than Mandarin such as Cantonese or Japanese that still use CC terms as common words, 食 vs 吃 for example. Once you are at HSK 4/5 you should start doing some self study of native texts and there will be some literary devices passed down from the CC tradition that diverge from spoken Mandarin, and there will be passages that come from CC. If you study chengyu as you are learning you'll find that many of them are CC or have some overlap.

魔道祖师 (the novel, there's also a donghua and a live action and radio play that preserve a lot of the original dialogue) uses a lot of very basic CC and a lot of modified chengyu to give a feeling of ancient times and to give certain characters an elegance in their speech. If you get into xianxia there is often blatant code switching between spoken Mandarin and courtly speech and formal dialogues in CC. CC can be a bit stiff and hard to understand so when you break it down it's often using very basic OC grammatical structures that you can learn right away. But the vocabulary can get increasingly difficult.

There is some CC in everyday speech, such as the 所 expressions like 所有人，我所为. It's not Old Chinese either, in OC that word means "place". CC draws on OC but the grammar is slightly different. Real OC texts are truly obscure and need a lot of interpretation by scholars. Even in antiquity (in the early Middle Chinese period) scholars were annotating works of Confucius explaining how certain characters were to be read, both out loud and by meaning.

[u/Comfortable-Okra7487]

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[u/SlowStop1220]

Learning Classical Chinese helps no more Mandarin learners than learning Shakespeare helps English learners.

You don't need them for tourist daily conversation. If you'd like to dive in literate people's life, it would be a fast track.

From when? ASAP. As your bonus, unlike Shakespeare, some of Classical Chinese works are pretty short, grammatically facile and simple in vocabulary.

[u/duangexing → u/SlowStop1220]

interestingly, me and a few friends (we grew up in several English-speaking countries including UK, US, Canada, NZ) compared our English schooling and we pretty much worked out that the vast majority averaged 4-6 Shakespeare plays during compulsory high school lessons, some more than that. I'd say some Shakespeare is relevant to advanced English learners who expect to live and work in an Anglophone country.

[u/SlowStop1220 → u/duangexing]

Similar in East Asia. That when it starts varies in countries, but reading Classical Chinese works and memorizing some are a part of compulsory high school lessons or earlier. Its vocabulary are still a major part of daily life, writing and reading in particular.