Reply #8

I was in the Linguistics Department with a concentration in Japanese, and my adviser, who hadn't been on the job market since the 1950s and rarely had graduate students, told me that I had to minor in Chinese in order to get a job. (This is not the case, and wasn't even back then.)

I actually enjoyed learning modern Chinese, and it came in handy when I visited Taiwan and China years later (I learned to speak up to a tourist level), but after I'd had 1 years of semi-intensive (9 hours a week) modern Chinese, my adviser said, "Enough of that modern Chinese. You have to take classical."

Normally, students take Classical Chinese after two or three years of modern, but I was tossed in there with a bunch of undergraduates and graduate students who were majoring in Chinese, with a few native speakers thrown in for good measure.

Modern Chinese grammar is actually pretty easy and straightforward. Classical Chinese looks like a random list of words strung together. I told my friends, "It's the world's only completely ambiguous language."

I spent hours on it every day and still completely blanked out on the first semester final. I didn't even remember the characters I knew from Japanese. (One upside to that experience: when I started teaching, I knew students weren't lying when they came to me in tears and said they'd blanked out on a test.)

After that debacle, my adviser and the Chinese linguistics professor conferred and decided that I could just audit the second semester. It was a major relief. But Chinese historical phonology and dialectology still lay ahead of me.

As I mentioned before, the modern Chinese has come in handy during my travels. Not only was Classical Chinese an ordeal but I've never used it.