Recently I’ve been figuratively banging my head against the edifice of “Classical Chinese” 古代汉语 resulting in headaches and frequent naps. Specifically we’ve been reading the “Spring Autumn” 春秋 by Zuo Qiu Ming 左丘明 (I’m told that this is a very famous history book). Paradoxically, it’s extremely facinating on the one hand, and utterly boring on the other. I suppose its the content that is putting me to sleep: Emperor of such and such place marries princess of such and such place. They have sons of such and such name, one of which was born backwards and thus everyone hated him (yeah, I don’t quite get that either). Then the sons squabble over the throne from which one successfully defeats the other, etc, etc. The facinating part is how each character is so rich with meaning, culture, and history not just in the way it is used, but the strokes that are used to write it.

之 曰 为 以

These are just some important characters that can have many different meanings based on context. (Left to Right: “zhi1″ “yue1″ “wei4″ “yi3″). I suppose my purpose in studying classical Chinese is to strengthen my foundation in the language by building from the bottom, not just adding more vocab, grammer, etc. from the top. The world of Chinese characters is such a vast edifice!