I want to read east asian poetry, should I choose to learn Chinese

read wuxia instead

>>8400617
Bump

>>8400617
go with japanese. just read about kobayashi issa's life and it should be enough to convince you.

昨夜扁舟雨一蓑
滿江風浪夜如何
今朝試卷孤蓬看
江山依舊綠樹多

>>8400781
damn i can actually read this albeit not completely

>>8400895
How long would it take for someone with zero knowledge of kanji or chinese grammar/vocabulary to read something like this?

>>8400901
a few years. depends on how fast you learn.

>>8400901
if you did a chinese degree (with some modules in classical) you'd be able to read it fine but otherwise hard to say because learning a language on your own takes a lot of time and motivation (probably 1500 characters minimum for short poems like that)

the good news however is that written poetry is very terse and has little grammar, almost entirely a series of adjectives and nouns, so if you have a good vocab (which japanese kanji would also give you) then you can almost understand it completely

>>8400936
very wrong

the lack of grammar is a hindrance and not an aid for "understanding"

i'd liken it to reading john donne's poetry where he often leaves words out that you need a good command of the language to be able to fill in through context and implied parallelisms with other sections of the poem

depending on who you ask you need to know between 500 - 5000 characters to read a newspaper. multiply that for poetry, which uses a lot of esoteric and/or archaic characters, as. For example in this poem, 扁 is a homograph that's read pian1 and not bian3 as is common, 扁舟 is not at all a common word/thing, and蓑 is incredibly archaic, and that's just in the first ilne.

>>8400954
i probably shouldn't say 'understanding' then, but being able to get some sense out of it.

as for needing 10k, 15k words to read classical poems, i would disagree since classical chinese used much fewer characters and poems. school children in china are taught and able to read short classical poems for example.

>>8401001
schoolchildren are taught to memorize them and recite them on demand, lets not confuse that with understanding

reading verse generally requires much stronger proficiency in a language than reading prose. this holds true across all languages.

classical chinese is extra weird because while superficially the same language and utilizing mostly the same writing system, the grammar and syntax is pretty different.

>>8400781
Ah, balls, my memory was out on the last line. It should be:

昨夜扁舟雨一蓑
滿江風浪夜如何
今朝試卷孤蓬看
依舊青山綠樹多

>>8401001
>i would disagree since classical chinese used much fewer characters
I'd say the reverse is true if anything- there are a lot of characters in classical Chinese that are no longer used, or that have changed/lost their meanings. Technically the vocabulary is bigger now, simply due to accumulation over time, but very few of the total 80,000ish (?) characters are actually used.

When kids learn poems (or other old literature) in school they'll have annotations explaining archaic/unfamiliar language. On the plus side the poems are generally super-short so they can be memorised, and some of them are indeed simple enough that they can be understood without annotation.

>>8401108
>tfuckingfw know mandarin but not classical

Last night it rained on my small boat.
It filled the river into a stormy sea, how nightly.
Now I have to take a test and look, roll up a lonely Peng.
There's a lot of trees in QingShan, just like before.

I've spent like seriously 6 hours every day for two years studying Chinese (self taught), I should kill myself.

>>8401165
Why? Your vocab seems very good. You're missing stuff, but then if you haven't studied classical that's not surprising (and you might well need to look up things anyway).

You should learn classical though, it's fun