An Introduction To Literary Chinese / Edition 2

by Michael A. Fuller

Overview

This textbook for beginning students contains 35 lessons of increasingly difficulty designed to introduce students to the basic patterns of Classical Chinese and to give them practice in reading a variety of texts. The lessons are structured to encourage students to move beyond reliance on the glossaries provided in the text and to become increasingly familiar with dictionaries and other reference works. The Introduction to the book summarizes the grammar of Literary Chinese. Part I presents eight lessons on parts of speech, verbs, negatives, and the basic sentence structures. Each lesson contains a grammatical overview, a short text with glossary and notes, and practice exercises. Part II consists of sixteen intermediate-level lessons based on increasingly long and complex texts. The advanced-level, Part III, focuses on selections from five important early Chinese authors. Part IV has six lessons based on Tang and Song dynasty prose and poetry. Appendixes provide further discussions of grammatical issues, chronologies and maps, and a glossary of function words.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674017269
Publisher:	Harvard University Asia Center, Publiications PRG
Publication date:	01/28/2004
Series:	Harvard East Asian Monographs Series , #176
Edition description:	Revised
Pages:	392
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 10.00(h) x 0.81(d)

About the Author

Michael A. Fuller is Professor of East Asian Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Irvine.

Table of Contents

Preface

Introduction
Part 1 Problems of Reading and Understanding
Part 2 A Sketch of Literary Chinese

Part I: Texts to Introduce Basic Grammar
Part II: Intermediate Texts
Part III: Advance Texts
Part IV: Selected Tang and Song Dynasty Writings

Appendixes
A. Issues in the Linguistic Aspects of Literary Chinese
1. Topic and Subject in Literary Chinese
2. Syntax and Phonology in Archaic Chinese
3. Complements
B. Dynasty Timeline, Maps, and Measures
C. Romanizing and Radicals
D. Glossary of Function Words

Index