![]() Even though I've been going through the beginning stages of learning to read LS / CC with a new batch of students in the fall semester for four decades (it's a two semester course), every year it's just as exhilarating as it was the first time. They discover different dimensions of thinking (nooks and crannies of the brain) that they never knew existed. Those who stick with it have a mind-blowing / bending / altering / expanding experience. Usually the students work together to prepare for the daily recitations. Some of them take it a second time, but it still doesn't sink in. Occasionally I have to give a C, D, or alas, an F, when the poor student really wants to learn LS but just cannot do it. Those who stay the course usually receive an A or A-, seldom a B+, B, or B. ![]() I tell them this will be the hardest class they have ever taken, and it is (except perhaps for organic chemistry). ![]() Everybody who comes knows that I spend the first few days dissuading those who are not genuinely serious about the class from taking it. I've been teaching First-year Classical Chinese for forty years, and I love to do it. It's similar to learning how to write Chinese characters: practice practice practice! To understand LS well, you have to read vast amounts of it. To comprehend a LS text, you have to possess immense learning and uncanny intuition, or else you just memorize it and rely on your teacher's explication of the meaning. It was all very precise and explicit, so long as you knew the rules. It was hard, but if you were conscientious it was doable. For me it was Lanman's Reader, starting with Mahābhārata, then Hitopadeśa and Kathāsaritsāgara, and off we went. Having mastered the foundations and clutching Whitney's Grammar and a good dictionary (I was attached to Monier Monier-Williams), you jump right into real texts. We started with Perry's Primer to pick up the basic grammar and core vocabulary. I remember how I began the learning of Sanskrit. With their moods, tenses, gender, number, conjugations, declensions, paradigms, and whatnot, learning these languages is most assuredly tremendously demanding, but they cannot begin to compare with the humiliating experience of trying to make sense of a passage in LS when its subject is not explicit, the time when it happened is not clear, and all you know is a succession of uninflected morphemes interspersed with some often highly ambiguous particles that may indicate more or less pertinent relationships among the morphemes. To me it is far more challenging than Sanskrit or Classical Greek or Latin. If you want to experience a language learning task that is really and truly daunting, give Literary Sinitic (LS) / Classical Chinese (CC) a whirl. Spanish came out overall as the easiest widely spoken language for many people to learn, while Arabic and Turkish struck many people as quite difficult to master. ![]() Two days ago, in " Difficult languages and easy languages, part 2" (5/28/19), we listed scores of languages from easiest to hardest to learn.
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