Chinese Through Poetry by A. C. Barnes
Jan. 6th, 2010 09:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mvrdrkChinese Through Poetry by A. C. Barnes was one of the books I got over the holidays. The author is British and the text was written to use in his classes in classical Chinese. I think it reflects some kinds of older thinking about Chinese that may or may not be accurate per modern theories and just flipping through it I think there are some westernizations that I disagree with and will affect the translations. In any case, as I work my way through this book, I'll be posting notes and commentary about it with the tag Chinese Through Poetry so you'll know to skip it if you don't find it interesting.
The introductory material in this book is really good, though a little weird. It explains how some Chinese words are pictorial, some are sound based, some are radical and sound based, and some are just weird. It gives examples of modern characters with their oracle bone forms to give a flavor of how the character morphed in shape.
The introductory material also explains how to figure out what the radical is (general rules), how to figure out general stroke order, and shows the differences between print and hand written characters. This is the best non-boring high level explanation of those topics I think I've seen and probably useful to anyone learning writing of any hanzi (or kanji).
You'll note that I haven't even gotten to lesson one of the poetry yet. I'm still in the middle of the introductory (pre-unit 1) material and I have a short list of questions from my reading that I'll post tomorrow. Some of my questions are about (English) grammar.
The introductory material in this book is really good, though a little weird. It explains how some Chinese words are pictorial, some are sound based, some are radical and sound based, and some are just weird. It gives examples of modern characters with their oracle bone forms to give a flavor of how the character morphed in shape.
The introductory material also explains how to figure out what the radical is (general rules), how to figure out general stroke order, and shows the differences between print and hand written characters. This is the best non-boring high level explanation of those topics I think I've seen and probably useful to anyone learning writing of any hanzi (or kanji).
You'll note that I haven't even gotten to lesson one of the poetry yet. I'm still in the middle of the introductory (pre-unit 1) material and I have a short list of questions from my reading that I'll post tomorrow. Some of my questions are about (English) grammar.
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Date: 2010-01-07 08:04 am (UTC)I'm starting to try and teach myself some Mandarin. Well the children are learning so I might as well try it and see how I go.