First Course in Literary Chinese

This book is intended to provide a foundation in the grammar of classical Chinese on which the student who plans to specialize in classical studies can build, and to give the student of modern Chinese sufficient knowledge of literary Chinese for his purposes.

The material was developed over twenty years for use in the course "Introduction to Classical Chinese," as taught at Cornell University, where students of Chinese history and literature began their study of the literary language after one year of modern Chinese, and students in modern fields after two years. It is therefore assumed that the student can already pronounce Chinese words, use a system of romanization, read and write a few hundred Chinese characters, and understand simple passages of modern Chinese.

Volume II of this work consists of vocabularies for all of the texts and exercises in Volume I.