Following
the recent proposition of OL, I was incredibly lucky to find second-hand volumes of the classic books from Harold Shadick.
Not that easy (I just began), but I hope it will help me in the future with my learning of contemporary Chinese.
I can't help but share with you Victor Mair's words about this method:
I proudly and happily use Harold Shadick's
A First Course in Literary Chinese for the following reasons:
a. the linguistic apparatus, though a bit intimidating initially, is rigorous, precise, and integrally comprehensive
b. very intelligent grading of the texts from super easy to super hard
c. excellent selection of all sorts of texts: history, essays, poetry, philosophy, really everything you could want, including a couple of lessons on how to use traditional Chinese dictionaries
d. complete apparatus: texts, commentaries, annotations, grammar, vocabularies, maps
etc., etc.
Annoyingly, it's still being advertised by Cornell University Press, about 20-25 years after they let it go out of print!
http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/?GCOI=80140100632670&fa=author&person_id=1056
They advertise vols. I and II, but I don't even think that those two volumes have been available for years. Anyway, to use the book properly, you need all
three volumes.
I started using Shadick about 35 years ago. For awhile I had to get it through an official reprint from Meiya (?) in Taiwan. Then there were struggles with Cornell University Press for a few years, when they kept telling me it was still in print but they could never supply it. Finally, I started reprinting it myself from the wonderful Campus Copy Center right next to the Penn campus. They are reliable and I've had no problem whatsoever for about a quarter of a century that I've been using them.
BTW, the Shadick text uses Wade-Giles romanization, but I actually like that for two reasons:
1. Wade-Giles is still important for serious Sinologists and Chinese Studies people, since a century of scholarship used it.
2. Phonologically it is very intelligent, and is closest to IPA of all the major romanization systems.
I just hand out a conversion chart (WG-Pinyin; Pinyin-WG) at the beginning of the semester and the students who are familiar with Pinyin rely on that for a few weeks until they get used to WG.
All in all, Shadick's
A First Course in Literary Chinese is a wonderful textbook, and I highly recommend it to anyone who has a serious interest in mastering learning LS / CC. It's even quite suitable for someone who can't enroll in a formal class but would like to learn the language on their own.
), and should work fine with our document reader function. For now, you'd want to manually turn off "Use In Reader" for non-classical dictionaries in Settings / Manage Dictionaries, but in 4.0 it's possible to have multiple 'reader profiles' and pick a Classical-Oriented set of a dictionaries for a Classical document and a modern-Chinese-oriented one for a modern Chinese document.