What am I doing these days?

I am almost finished writing a book that teaches Chinese characters by simultaneously teaching how to read Literary Chinese (한문). It is for English-speaking, Korean language learners who can read 한글 and who also want to learn Chinese characters (한자) and Chinese sentences (한문). Chapter One starts with some of the basic characters, such as numbers and colors, used in simple Chinese sentences to teach basic grammar rules, and the other chapters build from there. Each chapter introduces about 15 new characters and new grammar and has a number of sentences that practice the different meanings of the characters and their grammar functions, if any.

Only the new characters in the lesson being studied and characters previous studied are used in the chapter's example sentences so as to keep the focus on the new characters and to review characters already studied. Here is an eample sentence from one of the chapters:

The Master (子) said (曰), “At thirty (三十而), [I] was established [in society] (立). At forty (四十而), [I was] without (不) doubts (惑).”

The above sentence talks only about when "the Master" (Confucius) was 30 and 40 years old because the point of these sentences is NOT to teach the whole passage, but rather to teach the new character 惑 (혹) and to teach a new grammar point related to 而 (에). The other characters in the sentence have already been learned in previous chapters. By the time readers finish all 41 chapters in the book, they will have learned more than 600 of the most commonly used Chinese characters and much of the grammar related to literary Chinese.

The book avoids using the names of people and places because those characters are usually the less common characters that a beginning student can put off learning until later.

The first volume will deal mainly with classical Chinese, but a second volume will deal more with the literary Chinese used in China in the 1800s, building on what has already been learned in Volume One. Volume Two will teach another 600 new characters.

I just pulled the above sentence out of the book to show people that learning literary Chinese (한문) is not as difficult as they may think. Also, it is much easier to learn Chinese characters (한자) by reading and writing them in sentences (한문) than it is to memorize individual characters or words.

I started writing the book because I got frustrated with the books that taught literary Chinese with Chinese pronunciations and with the purpose of being used in a classroom with an instructor rather than for self study. I wanted to write a book that would allow English-speaking, Korean language learners to teach themselves literary Chinese. That is the reason I try to translate every character used in the Chinese sentences instead of just writing a Chinese sentence with the English translation below it, which could leave questions in the minds of students who might not see how parts of the translation were achieved. A Chinese sentence with a an English translation below it might be all right if you have a teacher to explain it to you, but not if you are trying to learn it on your own.

Korea has some good books on this subject, but people have to be pretty fluent in Korean to understand them. Also, I think it is easier to learn Literary Chinese in an English textbook because Chinese and English sentence structures are more alike than Korean. Both Chinese and English, for example, use the Subject-Verb-Object structure, which makes a Chinese sentence easier to read and translate into English. Where it is easier to understand the Chinese sentence with Korean sentence structure, such as the 而 in the above sentence or Chinese relative clauses, which are similar to Korean style relative clauses, I point that out in my notes.

I have spent the past five years or more learning 한문 and the past three years writing this book, though the writing process has been interrupted with many breaks. I hope to have the first volume finished within a month and the second volume a few months after that.