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.

After an informative Introduction which covers the 'Problems of Reading and Understanding Chinese' and 'A Sketch of Literary Chinese,' the main body of the book follows in four parts: Part 1 - Texts to Introduce Basic Grammar; Part 2 - Intermediate Texts; Part 3 - Advanced Texts; Part 4 - Selected Tang and Song Dynasty Writings. The book is rounded out with six useful appendices - including a comprehensive 40-page 'Glossary of Function Words' - and a detailed 35-page Index.

Whereas each of the earlier lessons gives the Grammar needed for the lesson, the Texts, Vocabulary, Notes on the Texts, Questions, Exercises, and sometimes Bibliographic Exercises, these gradually fall away as the student's knowledge progresses, until in Part 4 only the bare texts of Mencius, Chuang Tzu, etc., are given.

No answers are provided for the numerous exercises, and many of them require that the student either have or have access to a comprehensive Chinese-Chinese dictionary. Other exercises require that the student have access to a university library with an extensive Chinese collection. It might also be a good idea to provide yourself with a copy of Edwin G. Pulleyblank's 'Outline of Classical Chinese Grammar,' a book on which Fuller draws heavily.

All in all this is an excellent textbook for students who already know modern Chinese, are studying with a competent teacher, and have access to a good library. Others who may be innocent of Chinese, but who have become intrigued by what is one of the most interesting and vigorous languages in the world, should look for a copy of Raymond Dawson's 'Introduction to Classical Chinese' (Oxford: Clarendon, 1968) or the same writer's 'New Introduction to Classical Chinese' (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984).

Unlike Fuller's textbook, neither of Dawson's require any previous background in Chinese at all - he even teaches you how to use a Chinese dictionary and how to write Chinese characters - and both can be used for self study. Parts 3 and 4 of the Fuller would be of interest, for their texts, to those who have already worked their way through Dawson.

20 of 21 found the following review helpful:


Excellent for those with previous know. of modern Chinese  Mar 17, 2003 By bryan12603
This is a review of An Introduction to Literary Chinese by Michael A Fuller.

"Literary Chinese" is not the same as modern or colloquial Chinese. Roughly speaking, literary Chinese (also called "Classical Chinese") is to modern Chinese as Latin is to Italian (or as Sanskrit is to Hindi). Literary Chinese was (according to most scholars) originally the written form of spoken Chinese, but it became a literary language used for writing and reading. Amazingly, it became the standard literary language for not only pre-modern China, but also for pre-modern Korea, Japan and Vietnam. (This is amazing because spoken Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese are actually not historically related to each other in the way that the European languages are related to each other.)

Few English-speakers learn Classical Chinese, of course, so there are few English-language textbooks for it. Michael Fuller has produced a very nice one.

This book assumes that the reader has some familiarity with Chinese characters (as by studying a year or two of modern Chinese or Japanese). This book will NOT teach you how to recognize the parts of a character (which is a crucial skill in memorizing them), or how to write them, or how to use a dictionary. So someone with no knowledge of Chinese will almost certainly find this book extremely intimidating.

However, this is really good book, I think, for students with some previous exposure to Chinese characters. Fuller's Introduction begins with a clear, sensible explanation of basic hermeneutic issues (e.g., why "Grammar Is Not Enough"). He then presents a learned but clear overview of grammar and phonology, with a bibliography for further reading.

This is well done, but I think most students should skip it and dive right into the first lesson. The first eight lessons each introduce a major grammatical feature (e.g., "Nominal and Verbal Sentences," "Parts of Speech," etc.). The structure of these chapters is explanation, Chinese text (long form characters throughout), vocabulary list (including pronunciations using pinyin romanizations), grammar notes, and exercises.

One of the things I like best about this book is that, right from the beginning, Fuller uses actual Classical Chinese texts. Lesson one uses two brief passages from the Analects of Confucius. I think it will be very exciting for students to be reading the "greats" of Chinese thought from the get-go.

Beginning with Lesson 9 (p. 103), the notes become less extensive. However, the new vocabulary items are still identified, and discussion questions of the content, and grammatical "review questions" (e.g., "Is X used as a coverb here?") are added. Then starting with Lesson 25 (p. 175), readings include only new vocabulary items (although when an author appears for the first time in this section, Fuller supplies a general introduction to him, and brief suggestions for further reading). The reading selections close with "Selected Tang and Song Dynasty Writings" (p. 229ff.), which are only the Chinese text, with no vocabulary or notes. Before this last section, all the readings are ALMOST all from the Warring States Period (403-221 BC) or Han Dynasty (202 BC to AD 220). This is a good choice, since these periods are generally thought to have produced the paradigms of Classical Chinese style.

If you are desperate to teach yourself Classical Chinese, and cannot begin with a good course in Modern Chinese, I would recommend buying this book with _Reading and Writing Chinese_ by William McNaughton, which walks you through how to write many of the most common characters. (Even better is the _Far East 3000 Chinese Character Dictionary_ pubilshed by The Far East Book Co., Ltd., but this is not available on Amazon, for some reason.)

4 of 4 found the following review helpful:


For use with a teacher  Oct 02, 2006 By Alfredo Pizzirani
I have been exploring Classical Chinese for a few months now. I am not following a formal course of study. I have studied Mandarin and Japanese in the past.

The book has interesting material on the history of the Chinese language. The introduction to grammar is also useful, and the function word list in the appendix is very handy.

On the whole, however, the explanations given, even for the introductory texts, are too concise for someone working on his own. I am finding "Classical Chinese: A Basic Reader in Three Volumes" by Yuan et al. much better suited to my needs, because the text analysis is much more thorough and the vocabulary list richer. By the way, Yuan's reader also has a complementary volume on poetry, while Fuller focuses on prose only.

5 of 6 found the following review helpful:


Needs editing and proofreading!  Aug 13, 2004 By J. Stephen Pearson
I have worked through this book twice now, once just to get a sense of the grammar, and a second time to translate more of the original texts Fuller includes.

For learning grammar, I have found the text useful, although Fuller at times assumes that readers know modern Chinese and therefore doesn't include romanizations during the introductory section, and includes words in the exercises at the end of the chapter that have not been introduced in the lessons and are not included in the glossary. Still, the appendices of romanization comparisons and of function words are very useful.

For translating authentic passages, the book is very good about using real texts, with commentaries, and about not shying away from difficult passages. However, my experience was that the texts became very difficult very quickly (in the middle of the intermediate section), and his notes become less helpful, before vanishing altogether with the advanced section.

While in general the book is useful, it does have some editorial problems (like those mentioned above) that should be addressed if the book is reprinted. The vocabulary is erratic--some lessons use words that are not introduced in the vocabulary list, while in other lessons, the vocabulary list includes words that have already been listed two or three times in previous chapters.

Further, the glossary in the back assumes that you already know both the character and the pinyin romanization, so that readers with limited experience with the language are forced to resort to another dictionary to find the character before being able to see if Fuller has included it in his glossary.

If you're new to Chinese and are going to use this book, be prepared to supplement it with Pulleyblank and other reference works, and to spend some time slogging through the more advanced lessons without much help from the author.

2 of 3 found the following review helpful:


A great way to get started!  Mar 10, 2007 By A. Taylor
This introduction to classical Chinese contains readings on all levels of difficulty. It also has many readings taken from the classics. There's selections from The Analects, Mencius, Zhuangzi, Hanfeizi, and much more. It is motivating to be able to read the texts that probably got you interested in classical Chinese in the first place! While this is a great introduction it's most likely the case that you'll need some background in the Modern Chinese, because these sections progress pretty fast. Still, out of all of the books I've looked at this seems the most helpful in getting one started with the Classical Chinese.

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