CHNS GU4301

Hey, he is a really nice guy! Why so many bad reviews? It's unfair. He is a nice grader! At least give you an A-.

The amount of translation you're actually expected to do is minimal. The daily dictations are trivially easy for anyone that has experience learning Chinese (you just need to be able to recognize the traditional characters, at no point will you be expected to produce them from memory). Class time is spent working through the text with a lot of hand-holding from Liu. Some people get more out of this than others. If you ask questions about translation, you may be able to glean more insight into why a passage was translated in a particular way. If you just are in it for the A, memorize exactly what he says and spit it back out on exams. Homeworks and tests pop up from time to time. Don't worry about them. A homework sheet can (and should) be completed in a single night while eating a five guys burger and watching sports highlights on youtube. If you're a weirdo and actually count the number of minutes you spend working, I'd guess you could finish the work with about forty minutes of effort. Test prep--reread the stuff you're being tested on and reread the homeworks. You will have seen everything Liu puts on a test several times before.

I agree with the last review. Though Liu does give you the impression that he's not entirely emotionally invested in the class, he is a professional and does a pretty good job teaching the material. This isn't to say that the pedagogy is perfect. In my eyes there are a lot of things that could be changed about the way that Chinese is taught at Columbia, but that's more of an institutional critique than anything against the man himself (though he is department head, so these issues still may bear mentioning). He operates well in the system that has been set up. I really appreciated Liu's formal treatment of Classical Chinese grammar. Being able to parse a CC sentence and understand all of the stuff that's going on underneath the hood is awesome. I wish that they had this sort of thing for the Modern Chinese courses. It might have something to do with the fact that this is taught in English. Whatever it is, the guy knows his stuff. I know much more now than I did in September. Liu also seems to be an active member in the academic community, for what it's worth. If you have questions about Chinese literary culture or linguistics, he's your guy. He also has a kick-ass reading voice that I am determined to master. As a person, Liu seems like a pretty nice guy. I didn't pick up any of the mystique (either good or bad) that gets attributed to him in some of these reviews. Part of thi…

daily quiz, ~30-40 characters, purely recognition, not writing. Fortnightly homeworks that, depending on the long translation at the end, take anywhere from a few to a lot of hours.

Having read the other reviews, I am a bit surprised at the bad rap Liu gets here. He is, to quote another review, a cool guy, definitely not a strict grader, and reasonably good at explaining complicated grammar despite his accent. [In response to a few other reviews] I'm going to pull an unpopular card and say that if you, the student, didn't remember anything from his class, that's your fault and not his. I'll summarize my experience briefly: --The study of Classical Chinese is heavy on grammar analysis. American students are not used to grammar analysis (generally speaking), therefore, it is a difficult subject to grasp. --If you do your due diligence and learn the [English] words he uses to analyze grammar, you won't have a hard time getting by. Grammar vocabulary is just as important as vocabulary in the lesson. Wikipedia is a good tool for this. --The homework is maybe tedious at first, but the homework and quizzes/tests are all constructed the same; that is to say, the sections on both are equivalent and have the same kinds of questions, and therefore there are no surprises when the tests come around. --A knowledge of Chinese is extraordinarily helpful. In no small part because modern Chinese translations of Classical Chinese exist on the internet. --I'm in 5th year Chinese.

Daily dictations plus a pretty tough quiz and a tedious, time-sucking homework assignment every two weeks, a final and a translation project.

Liu Laoshi is a great professor and a really nice guy, and this is a good class. A couple of warnings are in order: first, although I don't think there are any official prerequisites for the class, it would be hard without at least some knowledge of Chinese characters. Liu spends a lot of time comparing modern and classical Chinese, which could be pretty dull if you don't have any experience with the former. Second, although for some baffling reason this class is only worth three points, it is about as much work as any five point colloquial Chinese class. There is also no avoiding Friday classes. Aside from these matters the class is great. The material is generally very interesting (mostly philosophical proverbs and the Shi Ji), and Liu's extensive training as a linguist actually helps; he is exceptionally good at communicating what he knows to people like me who don't know a damn thing about linguistics. That, and his wardrobe and demeanor give him the appearance of a suave James Bond villain.

how to understand and translate classical chinese - by actually reading historical texts written in classical chinese which is very cool

Know more about how to analyze and understand a article written in classical Chinese and how classical Chinese is constructed. Read many historical stories about pre-Qin period, e.g. Shiji.

very limited group of people who would be interested i think haha but for those people absolutely! 1 Columbia University: Arts & Sciences Fall 2021 Course: CHNSGU4301_001_2021_3-INTROTOCLASSICALCHINESEI : CHNSGU4301_001_2021_3 - INTRO TO CLASSICAL CHINESE I Instructor: Lening Liu