>>19610>What resources do you recommend for Classical Chinese?My favourite book is Kai Vogelsang's 'Introduction to Classical Chinese', that, along with Paul Rouzer's 'A New Practical Primer' should be sufficient.
There are others, though, I also like Archie Barnes' 'Du's handbook of Classical Chinese Grammar' and 'Chinese Through Poetry'.
For a first look into it, Van der Norden's 'Classical Chinese for Everyone' is a very brief book giving a first taste for the language, you should start by reading that one.
Obviously ctext.org for classical texts and an on-line dictionary.
> I love ancient and classical languages too but they soak up a lot of time and there pay off isn't obvious.They do. For me the pleasure lies in the process itself. However little additional understanding I can get from even a brief brush with a language makes the reading of ancient texts, even in translation, many times more enjoyable. There are usually very many terms involved which have no easy translation, and meeting the language halfway adds a lot to the experience.
I don't think I would ever reach the point of being able to 'just read' the Mahabharata in the original without any aid. I enjoy the challenge of making sense of the original even if I depend on the translation. There is, for example, Sargeant Withrop's Bhagavad-Gita, which comes with thorough glosses for each word, showing all the grammatical information (such as verb roots, conjugation, case, number, etc).
>There are too many great languages and books to learn and so little time.Ikr, hence I am also learning Russian, so maybe I can read Tolstoi, Chekhov, Dostoievsky, Akhmatova, Lermontov, Pushkin…
