春雨直播app

This book, part of the Kadokawa Sophia Bunko collection, is a reissue of the same-titled edition published in 1980 from the Kadokawa Shojiten (small dictionary) series. It includes newly added corrections and commentary. Professor Ichiro Taguchi at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences in Komaba kindly collaborated on this revision. We both belong to the generation acquainted with the original work during our student days. Unfortunately, the book had not been reprinted and was only available at inflated prices in used bookstores. Therefore, we eagerly accepted without hesitation when we received the request to collaborate on the reprint.
 
There are many reference books on kanbun [classical Chinese writing used in Japan], but it is hard to find one with as many example sentences as this book. The explanations of the wording, which reference the interpretations of scholars of the Qing Dynasty and Edo period, are logical and easy to understand, making the book a must-have for those who want to take their reading comprehension of Chinese texts one step beyond what they learned in high school. Of course, as the book was written 40 years ago, revisions were necessary; however, we have tried as much as possible to retain the original author’s intended meaning. So long as you do not simply skim through the book, but instead make full use of the example sentences, you will undoubtedly acquire the specialized reading comprehension skills needed to read the text as is, without the aid of kunten [guiding marks for rendering Chinese texts into Japanese] or punctuation marks.
 
Exam prep books often claim that kanbun [classical Chinese writing] is an efficient subject, in which test takers can efficiently attain good marks simply by memorizing key phrases and a few contextual patterns. This may be true of kanbun with kunten guiding marks and prepared so that it can be read in the limited time of an exam. However, the joy of reading classical Chinese lies beyond that. Efficient reading simply means following the phonetic readings and the kaeriten [marks indicating order or reading] left by someone else. Instead, you should carefully read the example sentences, first without the phonetic readings and the reading-order marks and, eventually, without the punctuation marks. As you do so, you will begin to see how the literary language of classical Chinese, which has neither case particles nor verb conjugations, constructs logic and describes events.
 
Furthermore, given the availability of large amounts of textual data and images of classical Chinese texts, it is much easier today to see the context in which an example has been written and how it has been read and interpreted up to this point than when this book was initially published. The same is true for adding new examples by yourself. When I was studying using the original book, the most I could do was to copy the examples into a notebook without kunten guiding marks or punctuation marks. Today, there are so many more ways to use the book. Please give it a try.
 
Kanbun was once the foundation of thought and description. Our current language in Japan, even though it still uses Sinitic words, is far removed from this foundation. We no longer read and write in a literary style we used to only a hundred years ago. I would venture as far as to say that today’s society values the ability to speak English fluently, of course, over the ability to read kanbun. But perhaps that gives us the freedom to immerse ourselves in the study of kanbun. It is up to each of us to find the value in the world of kanbun with its long history and many variants. This book will be a good guide in this endeavor.
 

(Written by SAITO Mareshi, Professor, Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology / 2024)