Language Resources

Paul F. Rouzer, A New Practical Primer of Literary Chinese, Harvard East Asian Monographs 276 (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Asia Center : Distributed by Harvard University Press, 2007).

Morgan Rouzer's textbook is serving me well. as she explains, classical chinese—Warring States period writing—is upstream of all later forms of literary chinese. but those other forms often consist of specialized genre codes (buddhist, medical, etc.) which must be studied separately.

i have created an anki deck of vocab flashcards for this book. there already existed a deck of hanzi-to-english vocab cards for Morgan Rouzer's Primer, but it didn't cover all the lessons. i followed that model and recreated this more complete set from scratch, though it's regex work and not without errors. there are cards for both recognition and recall, and senses of each term are split up.

Paul W. Kroll, A Student’s Dictionary of Classical and Medieval Chinese: Revised Edition, Handbook of Oriental Studies. Section 4 China 30 (Leiden ; Boston, MA: Brill, 2017).

Kroll's dictionary has made working with literary sinitic massively easier. you can buy it in pleco, and there also exists a pdf version. after getting it in pleco, i discovered that for licensing reasons, paid dictionaries don't work with pleco's card export system. again using regex, i made my own deck, again separates and and numbers different senses of words. i haven't uploaded this anywhere, but if you need a copy, do reach out. because it contains the entire dictionary in order, the best way to use it is to first suspend all cards, then manually search for and unsuspend the ones you want to learn.

other canonical dictionaries i've found useful

• the Digital Dictionary of Buddhism run by Charles Muller
• Hucker's A Dictionary of Official Titles in Imperial China: a little old (uses Wade-Giles), but as i understand it, the english translations provided here are standard.
• Le Grand Ricci: chinese to french, the ultimate fallback. especially notable for its coverage of medical/botanical terms.

John Kieschnick and Simon Wiles, A Primer in Chinese Buddhist Writings, 3 vols., accessed January 3, 2025, https://religiousstudies.stanford.edu/primer-chinese-buddhist-writings.

i have not used this, but a friend has, and it seems to be the best introduction to reading buddhist texts.

CUP How to Read Chinese Literature series

this series consists firstly of anthologies of translations and essays covering different genres of writing (poetry, prose, drama). i've learned a great deal from the poetry one in particular. each is accompanied also by a literary chinese course text; i haven't worked through any in detail yet, but hope to do the prose one at some point.

Bernhard Führer and Xiufang Yang, Southern Hokkien: an introduction, 3 vols. (Guo li Tai wan da xue chu ban zhong xin, 2014). audio POJ 台閩字 eng

this textbook definitely seems the most logical and comprehensive, as well as the least tai-specific. it does take median Taiwan usage as default, but tries to make you aware of Quanzhou/Zhangzhou/Amoy differences in pronunciation, and sometimes flags vocabulary differences from SEA. POJ romanization is the primary form of writing taught, and the characters it does provide are chosen based on putative philological considerations, rather than historical usage or MOE standard—not good to employ unreflectively in communication. the audio for the textbook is available here, and NTU has a public video course in mandarin, by one of the authors, covering the first 6 (of 12) lessons.

other textbooks

hokkien/min discord eng

this server is a pretty nice environment, with mostly SEA hokkien heritage people.

dictionaries

pronunciation, romanization and writing

media

input methods tâilô 台閩字

for both Mandarin and Hokkien, i think you're best off with RIME. you can use it as an fcitx5 plugin on linux and android. use the config manager rime-plum to install rime-hokkien support for you. there is also a mobile input method called phahtaigi, though it is far less configurable.

fonts 台閩字

i use the late Andrew West's BabelStone Han, which supports a wide range of uncommon squaracters.

existing resource lists

i won't try to mirror existing lists, just draw out what i find most interesting.

Celia Brickman, A Short Course in Reading French (Columbia University Press, 2012).

i used this for a semester on reading french in undergrad and liked it. my french skills have totally rusted, but i might try it again.

anki

anki is the most potentially life-changing software in existence, a force multiplier on effort-invested that has no skill ceiling. its only "downside" is that you have to actually use it; it's completely on you to set a routine in which you do your flashcards every single day. if you aren't doing your flashcards, you have no one to blame for your unsatisfactory learning progress but yourself. people will rightly tell you that anki isn't everything, and you can't learn a language just by doing vocab memorization on your phone really hard. that's true—but less true than they think, and routine work in anki is certainly the basis for the rest of everything.

you will sometimes see people distinguish two types of vocab flashcards: recognition and recall. recognition means input; when you see (or hear) something in your target languagea term i'm misusing to mean "the language you're translating your body into."

and must try to understand what it means intuitively or in your source language.the language you're translating your body from.

recall, conversely, is when you're prompted with something in your native language and must recall the corresponding fragment in the language you're studying. i belong to the faction that swears by recall cards for vocabulary. you should be looking at a prompt in your native language and working to recall the corresponding pronunciation and written form of the word in the language you want to learn, not the other way around. a mechanical connexion between an english and a chinese term does not guarantee you can employ the chinese term fluently, but it is a base to rely on when you do practice those output skills. recognition is also important, but it is better to use sentence cards with natural usage context than to try to recall individual words.

having accepted all this, the main issue left is: how is one to acquire a sufficient body of example sentences, and ensure that one only studies directly pertinent ones, rather than ones that are excessively easy or difficult? the latter issue is solved by the add-on ankimorphs, which is complicated to initially set up, but incredibly powerful. ankimorphs analyzes the cards you've already studied to see which morphemes ("morphs") you know well, and which you are still learning. it then reprioritizes the cards you've never studied, so that you will only encounter ones which contain morphs you need to work on, or morphs that would be valuable to learn next. the intrinsic strength of SRS systems like anki is that they will always tell you exactly what you need to be reviewing; ankimorphs extends this principle to new territory by also telling you exactly what new information you need to be studying. in my setup, ankimorphs controls the order in which i see new sentence recognition cards, but for vocabulary recall cards, i mostly determine exactly what new vocab i want to study. some of this vocab is what i encounter in class or elsewhere outside anki, and some i create based on the previously-unknown terms that come up on the sentence cards ankimorphs chooses.

one last caveat is that ankimorphs does not know how to distinguish between different languages. if you want to use it with multiple, you will need to create multiple anki profiles and configure them separately, and set them to all sync to the same ankiweb account so that they can share data. this adds a little bit of hassle in switching between profiles, but it's not too bad. remember to set your secondary profiles not to sync media, or you may end up with unnecessarily bloated disk space usage!

when creating a sufficient body of sentence cards for ankimorphs to work with, there are a few sources.

1. you may be able to find anki sentence decks for a language just by googling.
2. using the movies2anki addon, you can feed in movies/dramas/anime you like and create cards with short video/audio clips. this is the main way to integrate listening practice into anki, rather than only reading.
3. i have experimented with feeding novels and other long texts i enjoy to bertalign so that i can create bilingual cards from them. this is excessively complicated, so probably not worth it to you.
4. if you read texts in a browser with yomitan, you can send words/sentences you look up to anki.
5. as will be discussed next, pleco is a very powerful dictionary app that can help you fill anki with both chinese vocabulary recall cards and example sentence cards.

at lower levels of skill, it's most convenient if your sentence cards have an english translation on the back, but because ankimorphs will only show you cards with up to one unknown term, you may be able to do without, especially as your skills advance—like a native speaker would, simply fill in the meaning from context, or look up the unknown word in the dictionary and add it to your vocabulary recall cards.

pleco integration

pleco is a must-have chinese dictionary app, which on android supports exporting dictionary definitions to ankidroid flashcards. setting up the feature is a bit complicated, but well worth it, and i rely on it daily. once it's configured, you merely need to tap the + button on a term entry to add a vocab card to anki. further, you can add example sentences as their own cards. my habit is to spam-add several example sentences at the same time as i create vocab cards, or when i encounter a term while reviewing and feel uncertain about its usage. ensuring in this way that you will run into the word's various usages separately as you study is far more effective than simply staring at the dictionary entry, hoping to comprehend and memorize the different usages all at once.

TODO reading texts (yomitan)

addons

i have made use of a few addons that helpfully extend the features of anki and what kinds of material it's suited to learning.

• ankimorphs: described above
• ankimorphs-chinese-jieba: used by ankimorphs for identifying terms in chinese cards. i've found it to work alright for hokkien and literary sinitic as well as mandarin.
• movies2anki: if supplied with a video file and two sets of subtitles (native and target language), creates cards to test your comprehension of individual dialogue lines. great for practicing listening/comprehension based on movies/tv you're already familiar with.
• lyrics/poetry cloze generator: for each line n in a poem, tests whether you know line n+1
• image occlusion enhanced: allows you to black out the labels on a diagram and test whether you know the points indicated; good for learning maps
• leaderboard: syncs your flashcard stats to a public leaderboard so you can compete against your friends as a source of motivation. don't lose your streak! my username is Dark_Warrior, and i've created a public group you can join for mandarin learners.
• ankiconnect: makes possible yomitan integration.
• hanzi stats: for mandarin; checks your vocab flashcards against HSK/TOCFL lists for coverage and missing characters