<p>As read in reference from <a href="http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%96%87%E8%A8%80%E6%96%87" rel="nofollow">Wikipedia (文言文)</a>, classic Chinese (文言文) was the oral Chinese back to the 先秦 era (era before Qing Dynasty, i.e. before 221BC).</p>

<p>Even as early as in Han Dynasty (汉朝, 202BC-220) to Tang Dynasty (唐朝, 618-907) period, the oral Chinese had already been shifting apart from classic Chinese (written) and the new Chinese (白话文) had already been merging even in writing. But during these times, the classic Chinese were still applied in most of the writing, especially, as I can imagine, for formal educations. </p>

<p>To answer the questions:</p>

<ol>
<li><p>as stated in the same Wikipedia page, before 20th Century, it was used in China, Korean peninsula, Japan and Vietnam, and in almost all formal writtings in these areas at that time. Later, gradually, these countries shifted to their own writing systems.</p></li>
<li><p>actually, just to answer this question, grammar seems not that important in Chinese as it is in English. This may be a very rough explanation. You may need to consult some formal linguistics knowledge for a more accurate answer.</p></li>
<li><p>why does a foreigner want to learn the classic Chinese in the first place? FYI, it is not used at all in almost all daily conversations, and it is really one of the biggest nightmares for Chinese students as it is compulsory in high school. In my personal experience, even educated Chinese people (say average college graduated) do not master the classic Chinese.</p></li>
</ol>

CC BY-SA 3.0
2011-12-14T08:02:06.613Z
"why does a foreigner want to learn the classic Chinese in the first place?" Well, that's a strange question for stackexchange. Why do we want to learn stuff? Out of utter curiosity of course. Classical Chinese is one of the great languages of culture, it has been in use for thousands of years. For me thats enough.
Falko
CC BY-SA 3.0
2011-12-14T08:53:01.660Z
@Falko I hope it does not cause any misunderstanding. Just from my impression, your question seems to come from the assumption learning classic Chinese may help you to learn modern Chinese and other languages such as Japanese. I thought that is one of the reasons why you want to learn classic Chinese. However, I just wanted to provide you with some 'facts' that this may not be the case because classic Chinese is really hard even for native Chinese speaker and seldom generates too much benefits in real life practice.I would recommend learning Chinese to a considerable high level first.
Flake
CC BY-SA 3.0
2011-12-14T13:03:01.620Z
Thank you for the explanation. I really misunderstood. Well, we both did :) I don't expect Classical Chinese to help for Modern Chinese. I just tried to cast doubt on the other direction too. So I'd like to have a course about Classical Chinese without the way over (and independent of) Modern Chinese. It seems to be a completely different language after all.
Falko
CC BY-SA 3.0
2011-12-14T13:21:15.523Z
@Falko That is interesting. Not sure if that is easy/easier to directly learn classical Chinese. But all in all, one still need to learn the characters, basic rules, etc. And I would not say it is another different language, but it does have its far distances from the modern one. Not sure at all, but perhaps the relation is similar to the one between Old English (or Latin?) and English.
Flake
CC BY-SA 3.0
2011-12-14T15:32:35.527Z
I don't expect it to be easier then learning it after Modern Chinese. If you know Modern Chinese, you know the characters after all. I just get the impression that there might be a short cut.
Falko
CC BY-SA 3.0
2011-12-14T15:37:45.363Z
Maybe it boils down to the following: How helpful in learning the characters is knowing the way to speak them? It certainly is not needed for the pure pictographs or ideographs, but these are a small fraction only.
Falko
CC BY-SA 3.0
2011-12-13T23:33:31.417Z
2011-12-14T19:59:37.200Z
2011-12-14T19:59:37.200Z
Flake
<ol>
<li><p>The wiki link you provided can explain this very well. For historic reasons, the Chinese writing system influenced almost all of East Asia. So many countries and nations used Chinese characters or borrowed a subset of Chinese characters. That's another story.</p>
</li>
<li><p>If you want the answer to this question, you should check the History books. In short, countries like Korea and Vietnam used to be ancient China's tributaries. For communication with the Chinese government, they took Chinese characters as their own languages' written characters.</p>
<p>But Japan is different, Japan was never a tributary of China. The Chinese traveled to Japan, then the Japanese took some parts from Chinese characters to construct their own writing system. On the other hand, Chinese language researchers believe one important reason why China did not fragment into smaller countries like Europe did is because of  their written language. Chinese has so many dialects but only have one written language.</p>
</li>
<li><p>Even in China, students won't study classical Chinese until they enter 9th grade. So it is true like you said, learn modern Chinese first then Classic. Many Chinese idioms (成语) are inherited from classical Chinese and used widely in modern life. So I believe that before you can learn classical Chinese, you'll need to be build a strong foundation with modern Chinese.</p>
</li>
</ol>

CC BY-SA 3.0
2011-12-14T17:47:43.953Z
2011-12-16T19:55:26.187Z
2020-06-17T09:50:11.587Z
Alex Chen
<p>To take one example, the Japanese language has two "strains," an indigenous strain, and a "Chinese" strain. The latter is written using "Kanji" (classical Hanzi), and if not identical to Chinese, is recognizable to Chinese speakers. Likewise, the Japanese use of Kanji is similar (although not identical) to the corresponding Hanzi. Thus, a Chinese person writing  Hanzi could be understood by a Japanese, but a Japanese person speaking the "indigenous" strain would be incomprehensible to a Chinese.</p>

<p>It's like saying that English has both Germanic and Latin strains, therefore two words, "chair" and "stool" that correspond to the French "chaise." The English speaker might be comprehensible to a Frenchman speaking or writing about "chairs," and other French-based words, but not when using Germanic words like "stool."</p>

CC BY-SA 3.0
2011-12-14T17:07:12.737Z
2011-12-14T17:07:12.737Z
Tom Au
<p>As far as I know, classic Chinese is not used to "write" these languages as you think. Classic Chinese was just used as an "international" language among surrounding countries, like English nowadays. Take the Japanese Language for example.</p>

<p>In ancient times, the Japanese had their own language, but they didn't have a writing system. Of course, China was powerful back then and exerted influence over the surrounding countries. Japan also imported Chinese characters and culture, especially during the beginning of the Tang Dynasty (唐朝) in China. </p>

<p>After learning Chinese characters, some Japanese scholars started to use characters to note the pronuciations for Japanese words, something like the PinYin system, as now we use Latin letters express Chinese. However, every character had its own pronunciation and meaning, so the Japanese created their own "letters", now called "hiragana" and "katakana", based on Chinese characters. For example, the "hiragana" "あ" comes from the character "安", "か" from "加". They look similar, right? </p>

<p>This also happened to Vietnamese. The Vietnamese created their Vietnamese characters(喃字) based on Chinese characters.</p>

<p>Nowadays, the Koreans don't use Chinese characters(but some characters are still used, especially in solemn situation and law), the Japanese still use them, and the Vietnamese quit thoroughly because the French instituted the use of a Roman alphabet during the colonization period.</p>

<p>So I think the answers to your questions would be:</p>

<ol>
<li>None. They developed their own writing system based on Chinese characters and borrowed a lot of words from Chinese</li>
<li>Since characters are used as writing system and letters to note the pronunciation. Grammar is not the point</li>
<li>Meanings for some characters changes through time. Furthermore, grammar also changes, so if you want to learn classic Chinese, you'd better learn mordern Chinese first. After you learn mordern Chinese, it won't be so hard for you to learn classic Chinese</li>
</ol>

<p>I suggest everyone who wants to learn Chinese: you might as well learn some classic Chinese. Although we don't speak in Classic Chinese, there are many words(especially idioms) from classic Chinese, such as "多行不义必自毙"，“退避三舍”,“秋波”。Also, you can read some classic poems to get a feeling of classic Chinese.</p>

<p><strong>Edit: More explanations on point 2.</strong></p>

<p>To clarify how the claiss Chinese were imported and affected Japanese. Imagine the steps below.</p>

<p><strong>STEP 1:</strong> Japanese had their language, so they could say: "この山は　高い" (This mountain is high), but they could not write this sentence.</p>

<p><strong>STEP 2:</strong> They got to learn classic Chinese, and they(especially the nobels) decided to use classic Chinese for communication, because Chinese culture was so attractive to them. Now the classic Chinese worked as a popular foreign language, like English nowadays.</p>

<p><strong>STEP 3:</strong> Some Japanese scholars thought:"well, Chinese seems good, why not create our writing system based on it?", and eventually they invented the "hiragara" and "katakara", by abstracting the Chinese Characters. For example, now they have "こ" from “己” and "の" from "乃“ and so on.</p>

<p><strong>STEP 4:</strong> Now they could use these "letters" to write down the sentence. It could be like this(without any characters): 　この　やま　は、たかい, but it's not so conevnient because they had to divide every word in writing.</p>

<p><strong>STEP 5:</strong> "Hey, we have learnt Chinese. In Chinese, “やま” is "山", and character "高" means high, in our language, it's たかい. Why not use characters to simplify the writing system?", Japanese might think this way. Of course, in Japanese, an adjective has serveral kinds of conjugations, but that doesn't matter, because only the suffix(い) should change, the stem(たか) won't change, so they just used the character “高” for the stem and everything works well. I.e. the negative form of "高い" is "高くない".</p>

<p>So I think you understand why importing characters won't affect the grammar.</p>

CC BY-SA 3.0
2011-12-14T21:45:20.330Z
Hello Huang. Thank you for your explanations. I still don't understand point 2.  So maybe you can help further. Why do you say "Grammar is not the point." As far as I understand, the grammar of Chinese (be it Classical or Modern) and Japanese is very different. And my understanding is, that for a time, the Japanese used just Chinese Characters. (Before they developed Hiragana and Katakana) How was this possible (or am I just wrong?)
Falko
CC BY-SA 3.0
2011-12-15T09:33:50.440Z
sorry for the late response. I will explain it after I get back home.
Huang
CC BY-SA 3.0
2011-12-15T11:51:09.167Z
@Falko I edited my answer, please review.
Huang
CC BY-SA 3.0
2011-12-14T13:05:54.267Z
2011-12-15T12:12:33.467Z
2011-12-15T12:12:33.467Z
Huang
<p>I understand that classical Chinese (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_Chinese" rel="nofollow">see Wikipedia</a>) was very different from spoken Chinese (at least in the last centuries of its usage). Nevertheless, despite or maybe even because of this, it was used to write more languages than just Chinese. </p>

<p>Three questions:</p>

<ol>
<li><p>What languages have been written with it? (I know about Chinese, Japanese, and Vietnamese.)</p></li>
<li><p>Why was this possible? These languages are not only spoken differently, they have different grammar (or don't they).</p></li>
<li><p>Currently, if a foreigner wants to learn Classical Chinese, (in all cases known to me) he is asked to learn current spoken Chinese first. After pondering the first two questions - shouldn't it be possible to translate it directly? (aka "read" it in the language of the reader.)</p></li>
</ol>

CC BY-SA 4.0
2021-03-28T13:08:43.103Z
The first question doesn't make sense to me. Classic Chinese is a language. What languages can be written with it? Only classic Chinese, nothing else. Many Korean history books are written in classic Chinese. They are not Korean language written in classic Chinese. They are Korean history written in classic Chinese.
joehua
CC BY-SA 4.0
2021-03-28T13:18:20.703Z
I don't know why foreigners who want to learn classic Chinese are asked to learn current Chinese first. Why can't they start from 三字經, then 論語, then 史記? This is pretty much how kids in 私塾 learnt Chinese. The only problem I see is that teachers may not be able to explain the books in classic Chinese because their classic Chinese is probably not good enough to be used in conversion. They ask foreigners to learn current Chinese first so they can explain the books in current Chinese, not classic Chinese, which they probably can't speak fluently.
joehua
CC BY-SA 3.0
2011-12-13T22:53:55.257Z
The Classical Chinese, or 古汉语, was the official (written) language in ancient China.  The Chinese language and culture has influenced many east Asian countries, but you cannot say that Japanese and Vietnam had been written with in -- those are different languages but shares certain characters with Chinese.
Frank
CC BY-SA 3.0
2011-12-13T22:56:52.990Z
Korean is another language that uses the Chinese characters.(in writing)
StarCub
<classical-chinese><literary-chinese>
Classical Chinese Literature - What languages could be written with it? And why?
# Classical Chinese Literature - What languages could be written with it? And why?

(Asked by: username_0 on 2011-12-13)

I understand that classical Chinese ([see Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_Chinese)) was very different from spoken Chinese (at least in the last centuries of its usage). Nevertheless, despite or maybe even because of this, it was used to write more languages than just Chinese.

Three questions:

1. What languages have been written with it? (I know about Chinese, Japanese, and Vietnamese.)
2. Why was this possible? These languages are not only spoken differently, they have different grammar (or don't they).
3. Currently, if a foreigner wants to learn Classical Chinese, (in all cases known to me) he is asked to learn current spoken Chinese first. After pondering the first two questions - shouldn't it be possible to translate it directly? (aka "read" it in the language of the reader.)

**Tags:** classical-chinese, literary-chinese

> **Comments:**
> **username_2**: The Classical Chinese, or 古汉语, was the official (written) language in ancient China.  The Chinese language and culture has influenced many east Asian countries, but you cannot say that Japanese and Vietnam had been written with in -- those are different languages but shares certain characters with Chinese.  
> **username_3**: Korean is another language that uses the Chinese characters.(in writing)  
> **username_1**: The first question doesn't make sense to me. Classic Chinese is a language. What languages can be written with it? Only classic Chinese, nothing else. Many Korean history books are written in classic Chinese. They are not Korean language written in classic Chinese. They are Korean history written in classic Chinese.  
> **username_1**: I don't know why foreigners who want to learn classic Chinese are asked to learn current Chinese first. Why can't they start from 三字經, then 論語, then 史記? This is pretty much how kids in 私塾 learnt Chinese. The only problem I see is that teachers may not be able to explain the books in classic Chinese because their classic Chinese is probably not good enough to be used in conversion. They ask foreigners to learn current Chinese first so they can explain the books in current Chinese, not classic Chinese, which they probably can't speak fluently.  

---

## 4 answers

### Answer by username_7 on 2011-12-14. Score: 10 | Accepted answer

As far as I know, classic Chinese is not used to "write" these languages as you think. Classic Chinese was just used as an "international" language among surrounding countries, like English nowadays. Take the Japanese Language for example.

In ancient times, the Japanese had their own language, but they didn't have a writing system. Of course, China was powerful back then and exerted influence over the surrounding countries. Japan also imported Chinese characters and culture, especially during the beginning of the Tang Dynasty (唐朝) in China.

After learning Chinese characters, some Japanese scholars started to use characters to note the pronuciations for Japanese words, something like the PinYin system, as now we use Latin letters express Chinese. However, every character had its own pronunciation and meaning, so the Japanese created their own "letters", now called "hiragana" and "katakana", based on Chinese characters. For example, the "hiragana" "あ" comes from the character "安", "か" from "加". They look similar, right?

This also happened to Vietnamese. The Vietnamese created their Vietnamese characters(喃字) based on Chinese characters.

Nowadays, the Koreans don't use Chinese characters(but some characters are still used, especially in solemn situation and law), the Japanese still use them, and the Vietnamese quit thoroughly because the French instituted the use of a Roman alphabet during the colonization period.

So I think the answers to your questions would be:

1. None. They developed their own writing system based on Chinese characters and borrowed a lot of words from Chinese
2. Since characters are used as writing system and letters to note the pronunciation. Grammar is not the point
3. Meanings for some characters changes through time. Furthermore, grammar also changes, so if you want to learn classic Chinese, you'd better learn mordern Chinese first. After you learn mordern Chinese, it won't be so hard for you to learn classic Chinese

I suggest everyone who wants to learn Chinese: you might as well learn some classic Chinese. Although we don't speak in Classic Chinese, there are many words(especially idioms) from classic Chinese, such as "多行不义必自毙"，“退避三舍”,“秋波”。Also, you can read some classic poems to get a feeling of classic Chinese.

**Edit: More explanations on point 2.**

To clarify how the claiss Chinese were imported and affected Japanese. Imagine the steps below.

**STEP 1:** Japanese had their language, so they could say: "この山は　高い" (This mountain is high), but they could not write this sentence.

**STEP 2:** They got to learn classic Chinese, and they(especially the nobels) decided to use classic Chinese for communication, because Chinese culture was so attractive to them. Now the classic Chinese worked as a popular foreign language, like English nowadays.

**STEP 3:** Some Japanese scholars thought:"well, Chinese seems good, why not create our writing system based on it?", and eventually they invented the "hiragara" and "katakara", by abstracting the Chinese Characters. For example, now they have "こ" from “己” and "の" from "乃“ and so on.

**STEP 4:** Now they could use these "letters" to write down the sentence. It could be like this(without any characters): 　この　やま　は、たかい, but it's not so conevnient because they had to divide every word in writing.

**STEP 5:** "Hey, we have learnt Chinese. In Chinese, “やま” is "山", and character "高" means high, in our language, it's たかい. Why not use characters to simplify the writing system?", Japanese might think this way. Of course, in Japanese, an adjective has serveral kinds of conjugations, but that doesn't matter, because only the suffix(い) should change, the stem(たか) won't change, so they just used the character “高” for the stem and everything works well. I.e. the negative form of "高い" is "高くない".

So I think you understand why importing characters won't affect the grammar.

> **Comments:**
> **username_0**: Hello username_7. Thank you for your explanations. I still don't understand point 2.  So maybe you can help further. Why do you say "Grammar is not the point." As far as I understand, the grammar of Chinese (be it Classical or Modern) and Japanese is very different. And my understanding is, that for a time, the Japanese used just Chinese Characters. (Before they developed Hiragana and Katakana) How was this possible (or am I just wrong?)  
> **username_7**: sorry for the late response. I will explain it after I get back home.  
> **username_7**: @username_0 I edited my answer, please review.  

---

### Answer by username_4 on 2011-12-13. Score: 4

As read in reference from [Wikipedia (文言文)](http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%96%87%E8%A8%80%E6%96%87), classic Chinese (文言文) was the oral Chinese back to the 先秦 era (era before Qing Dynasty, i.e. before 221BC).

Even as early as in Han Dynasty (汉朝, 202BC-220) to Tang Dynasty (唐朝, 618-907) period, the oral Chinese had already been shifting apart from classic Chinese (written) and the new Chinese (白话文) had already been merging even in writing. But during these times, the classic Chinese were still applied in most of the writing, especially, as I can imagine, for formal educations.

To answer the questions:

1. as stated in the same Wikipedia page, before 20th Century, it was used in China, Korean peninsula, Japan and Vietnam, and in almost all formal writtings in these areas at that time. Later, gradually, these countries shifted to their own writing systems.
2. actually, just to answer this question, grammar seems not that important in Chinese as it is in English. This may be a very rough explanation. You may need to consult some formal linguistics knowledge for a more accurate answer.
3. why does a foreigner want to learn the classic Chinese in the first place? FYI, it is not used at all in almost all daily conversations, and it is really one of the biggest nightmares for Chinese students as it is compulsory in high school. In my personal experience, even educated Chinese people (say average college graduated) do not master the classic Chinese.

> **Comments:**
> **username_0**: "why does a foreigner want to learn the classic Chinese in the first place?" Well, that's a strange question for stackexchange. Why do we want to learn stuff? Out of utter curiosity of course. Classical Chinese is one of the great languages of culture, it has been in use for thousands of years. For me thats enough.  
> **username_4**: @username_0 I hope it does not cause any misunderstanding. Just from my impression, your question seems to come from the assumption learning classic Chinese may help you to learn modern Chinese and other languages such as Japanese. I thought that is one of the reasons why you want to learn classic Chinese. However, I just wanted to provide you with some 'facts' that this may not be the case because classic Chinese is really hard even for native Chinese speaker and seldom generates too much benefits in real life practice.I would recommend learning Chinese to a considerable high level first.  
> **username_0**: Thank you for the explanation. I really misunderstood. Well, we both did :) I don't expect Classical Chinese to help for Modern Chinese. I just tried to cast doubt on the other direction too. So I'd like to have a course about Classical Chinese without the way over (and independent of) Modern Chinese. It seems to be a completely different language after all.  
> **username_4**: @username_0 That is interesting. Not sure if that is easy/easier to directly learn classical Chinese. But all in all, one still need to learn the characters, basic rules, etc. And I would not say it is another different language, but it does have its far distances from the modern one. Not sure at all, but perhaps the relation is similar to the one between Old English (or Latin?) and English.  
> **username_0**: I don't expect it to be easier then learning it after Modern Chinese. If you know Modern Chinese, you know the characters after all. I just get the impression that there might be a short cut.  
> **username_0**: Maybe it boils down to the following: How helpful in learning the characters is knowing the way to speak them? It certainly is not needed for the pure pictographs or ideographs, but these are a small fraction only.  

---

### Answer by username_5 on 2011-12-14. Score: 2

1. The wiki link you provided can explain this very well. For historic reasons, the Chinese writing system influenced almost all of East Asia. So many countries and nations used Chinese characters or borrowed a subset of Chinese characters. That's another story.
2. If you want the answer to this question, you should check the History books. In short, countries like Korea and Vietnam used to be ancient China's tributaries. For communication with the Chinese government, they took Chinese characters as their own languages' written characters.

   But Japan is different, Japan was never a tributary of China. The Chinese traveled to Japan, then the Japanese took some parts from Chinese characters to construct their own writing system. On the other hand, Chinese language researchers believe one important reason why China did not fragment into smaller countries like Europe did is because of their written language. Chinese has so many dialects but only have one written language.
3. Even in China, students won't study classical Chinese until they enter 9th grade. So it is true like you said, learn modern Chinese first then Classic. Many Chinese idioms (成语) are inherited from classical Chinese and used widely in modern life. So I believe that before you can learn classical Chinese, you'll need to be build a strong foundation with modern Chinese.


---

### Answer by username_6 on 2011-12-14. Score: 1

To take one example, the Japanese language has two "strains," an indigenous strain, and a "Chinese" strain. The latter is written using "Kanji" (classical Hanzi), and if not identical to Chinese, is recognizable to Chinese speakers. Likewise, the Japanese use of Kanji is similar (although not identical) to the corresponding Hanzi. Thus, a Chinese person writing Hanzi could be understood by a Japanese, but a Japanese person speaking the "indigenous" strain would be incomprehensible to a Chinese.

It's like saying that English has both Germanic and Latin strains, therefore two words, "chair" and "stool" that correspond to the French "chaise." The English speaker might be comprehensible to a Frenchman speaking or writing about "chairs," and other French-based words, but not when using Germanic words like "stool."


---

