Paul Rouzer’s A New Primer of Literary Chinese is pretty much the best book of its class that I’ve seen. It covers literary Chinese for English speakers looking to learn in a self-contained package. The book does not build on any specific series and is completely standalone. By being standalone, it is suitable for pretty much any learning path. It also covers the Japanese Kanbun pronunciations as well as Korean Hanja pronunciations.
Layout of the Book
A New Primer of Literary Chinese is organized into individual units which build on each other treating the grammar like a new foreign language. This approach makes the material make far more sense. There are also a wide variety of exercises in each chapter with an answer key for the first 10 lessons (the 11th has some content technically, but it’s very limited and doesn’t cover the whole lesson).
Each lesson is composed of a passage or selection of passages, then a vocabulary section with all of the definitions for a given character or word, and then finally a grammar section with interspersed exercises. The passages are all real literary Chinese selections. The vocabulary list is extremely well thought out and includes pronunciation and definitions. The grammar sections are pretty standard and break down the given usage point of any grammatical point in order of appearance. The exercises are extremely useful and help bolster usage and understanding.
The Good
This book is well thought out and well organized. It is self-contained, so it is useful for virtually any course series. The material is designed to be good for self-study as well. The inclusion of the answer key makes it even more useful as each exercise type is introduced early on. The exercises are extremely straightforward and usually derivable from the text or grammar section itself (with easy substitutions).
Literary Chinese is taught more like a living language than most literary Chinese textbooks. There is also mention of the shifts which occurred in classical Chinese which affect grammar and vocabulary. A New Primer of Literary Chinese manages to cram a huge amount of information into a relatively small amount of space without being too Spartan.
What Sets It Apart
The self-contained nature of the work really sets it apart. Some literary Chinese courses try to pull this off, but most fail. They make the assumption you’re at least at some arbitrary level of learning Mandarin. That level will usually be somewhere between mid to high. This book makes no such assumptions. This work very well could stand as a first book after the basics of Pinyin and writing if you didn’t care about the modern language.
The font is amazing too. There is proper type and not some questionably drawn character which looks like it was scanned through a 90’s fax machine. I have never had an issue reading anything in the book or linking known characters with characters in Mandarin.
The fact it is designed to be compatible with self-study helps as well. I got this book my second or third year of learning Mandarin. I still feel I can reference it for certain literary structures and usage more than a decade later. Literary language was never my strong suit, but I still feel like I take something away each time I pick this book up. This book is damn near a work of art for a textbook. Without its help, I probably never would have felt confident enough to tackle translating the Dao De Jing.
What It Could Do Better
One critique I could give it is the lack of Cantonese pronunciation points. That doesn’t really affect me, but I know it is a big deal for some people. They included the Kanbun and Hanja readings but glossed right over Cantonese.
There is also a lack of cultural details for certain lessons. The whole course focuses on the language and glosses over many cultural points that are not explicitly linguistic. It makes sense for the scope of the book, but it would be a welcome addition as either an add-on or even a separate course tied to their lessons. Many cultural points receive some attention, but not enough to really understand without external context.
A New Primer of Literary Chinese is very much targeted at English speaking learners. I had some issues with the exercises due to the phrasing. The author very much expects you to memorize the terms literally, even though some terms don’t map perfectly.
Caveats
I covered the negatives previously, but it’s time to move onto some neutral caveats. These aren’t necessarily jabs at the content, but more things to be aware of if you like what you’ve seen so far.
This book moves fast. The first lesson has 27 characters. At more advanced levels, this wouldn’t be bad, but it includes every definition. You should be spending a week or so on a lesson at lower levels even if you are spending a lot of time on this book.
It’s made for self-study to a degree, but the answer key drops off after lesson 10. You get a little bit in lesson 11, but not a lot. This can definitely contemplate things.
The course is entirely self-contained so you don’t get through a massive amount of literary Chinese. You learn a lot, but there are still going to be a lot of holes after you finish this course. There are just under 1,400 characters and words covered in this book. That’s a lot, but arguably a drop in the hat compared to what you need for true fluency in literary Chinese. For reference, The DaoDeJing uses 806 characters. This book indirectly expects you to be learning Mandarin (or similar) at the same time.
Should You Get It?
If you’re learning Mandarin past a beginner’s level or for travel only, you need to learn literary Chinese. This book is an indispensable resource for classical Chinese. Since it’s self-contained, you don’t need to worry about it fitting your current materials or plan. This book is a treasure.
The only case I could make against it would be in the case of learning Cantonese specifically or for people fluent in Mandarin. Even for those fluent in Mandarin, it still can be extremely useful and a great addition if you haven’t had direct exposure to literary Chinese.
Conclusion
If you can deal with the few cons and aren’t learning Cantonese, this is a great book. It also stands if you are going further academically with Japanese or Korean. It is single-handedly the best literary Chinese book targeted at English speakers that I’ve seen. There are more comprehensive resources in Chinese, but they require a much higher language level and make many assumptions about background education.
There are caveats, but if the book addressed every issue, it would require multiple volumes. This book is also dirt cheap compared to a lot of textbooks. I feel this is a good work for any Chinese learner’s bookshelf. If you want to learn literary Chinese, get this book.
Get it here.