[Course Forum] A New Practical Primer of Literary Chinese

Community-Created Courses Chinese
1

This is a course forum for ‘A New Practical Primer of Literary Chinese’.

https://app.memrise.com/course/2347/a-new-practical-primer-of-literary-chinese/

I’ve made a lot of changes to the course in the past few weeks, which I hope are mostly positive changes for the people using this course:

  1. I edited the English entries so that they exactly match the translations given by Rouzer. Hopefully I did this in a way which didn’t delete other users’ progress. (Sorry if it did!)
    1a. (When I originally made this course (back when Memrise was in beta), when I entered a Chinese word, it would automatically be given an English translation, which I mostly just accepted. This time through, I tried to be pretty thorough about only giving the wording used by Rouzer.)
    1b. I also changed each entry, so that only one definition (Rouzer’s first definition) is given, while all the remaining definitions are accepted as alternates.
    1c. In some cases, this resulted in some long multi-word definitions that have to be typed out (or me arbitrarily assigning definitions like “question particle”), so I’d like to come up with a better solution at some point.
  2. I separated the characters with multiple pronunciations into separate entries. These are disambiguated using either Middle Chinese tones or the first letter of Mandarin pinyin.
    2a. (I went with Middle Chinese tones to keep it dialect-neutral, since I now have both Mandarin and Taiwanese in here. For Mandarin speakers,【平】generally corresponds to either 1st or 2nd tone (specifically,【陰平】to 1st tone and【陽平】to 2nd tone),【上】generally corresponds to 3rd tone,【去】to 4th tone, and【入】to any of the four. For Taiwanese speakers,【平】generally corresponds to either 1st or 5th tone (specifically,【陰平】to 1st tone and【陽平】to 5th tone),【上】generally corresponds to 2nd tone, 【去】to either 3rd or 7th tone, and【入】to either 4th or 8th tone.)
  3. I added multi-character words to the course, as they appear in the text.
  4. I added the Taiwanese Hokkien literary readings for all words. These are not included in the textbook (I looked them up myself), so there are likely to be some errors. Please point out to me any errors you find!
  5. I’m working on adding the vocabulary from Lessons 11-18.