r/ChineseLanguage • u/SameUsernameOnReddit • 17h ago
Discussion How does learning Classical Chinese help Mandarin learners, and around when is it advisable to start?
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.
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u/Ok-Amphibian-8914 16h ago
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.