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Tuesday, January 24, 2023

Learning Classical Chinese



Introduction


Recently, I stumbled on a Youtube video series for learning Classical Chinese conducted in Mandarin in a Zoom classroom setting. I find it highly informative and valuable as a learning tool. At the same time, I like how the knowledge was being transmitted. I believed it is an advance class for non-Chinese background students or at least non-native speakers of the language.

However, there are certain things which I find extremely annoying. Much of the time was wasted for the teacher trying her best to get student participation. I can sympathize with her. It was like pulling teeth. At first she opted for a voluntary basis but then when this did not work, she started to ask a random student for an answer. Later in the series, I believed she gave up on them and there was no more class participation. The other thing being the poor quality of video and audio supplements introduced in the class.

To be able to explain a subject, it means that I had understood it well. Hence, this is my main goal for this project. Because of time constraints, I will forgo any material that is not presented textually in the video class. Neither will I delve into supplemental exercises or material that are not presented in the class as well.

In the spirit of studying a traditional, topic, I shall be using traditional characters. I believe that that the only justification in using simplified characters is to facilitate a faster means of transmission.

Most of the examples are snippets of text taken from the Chinese Classics and therefore are translated textually without context and because of the conciseness and terseness of language, there are cases when there may be more than one interpretation. Since this project is on grammar, grammatical functions, etc. of the language, I will not delve into which interpretation is correct or more appropriate.

Tuesday, January 17, 2023

Videos               Text

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