Classical Japanese without Modern Japanese

6 comments

1. Every resource I’ve seen for classical Japanese either bases the grammar discussion around how it differs from modern… or is itself written in Japanese

   Some of the conjugations and tenses differ but the basic idea of how words stick to each other and what kinds of parts of speech can connect to another are relatively static, at least from what I can tell from only having dabbled in classical

   So you end up needing to know the 80% overlap anyways, thus it’s probably not worth skipping the modern

2. I’ve recently started studying Japanese linguistics on my own, so take this more as an input than as an answer, but from what I understand a majority of today’s Japanese vocabulary is sino-japanese, coming from middle chinese over 1500 years ago, and they also took the writing system. So it’s possible that there’s no real “classical Japanese” to study? Also from what I understand Japanese evolved a lot and quite continuously through the centuries, while other ancient languages seem to have had more kind of “spurts” of development, which means that you can actually study a reliable Latin that isn’t a patchwork of different periods of the language. Lastly, possibly very important when it comes to why you can’t find the same amount on resources on ancient/classical Japanese, is that all the ancient languages you mentioned are foundational languages for many other languages (afaik, Latin for romance languages and huge influences on most if not all European languages, Greek had its great deal of influence on Latin and Germanic languages, Sanskrit obviously Indian/South Asian languages plus in general had an impact on many other languages, and middle/ancient Chinese provided for sino-japanese, sino-korean and sino-vietnamese mainly, plus other influences). That is not the case for Japan. Again, I’ve only recently started so some of my understanding of this might not be completely accurate, but it might be something to consider 🙂

3. If you’ve studied Classical Chinese you can actually manage quite well if you stick to formal written language and ‘high’ literature (i.e. legal documents, chronicles or poetry, rather than novels or other forms of popular entertainment) because they were written not only with Chinese characters but according to Chinese morphosyntactic rules. This version of ‘Japanese’ (called *kanbun* 漢文) is basically Chinese with annotations that you can ignore, as long as you are not interested in how it was supposed to be read or conceptualised by the Japanese mind of the times.

   As for truly Japanese texts, I’m afraid you can’t get away with getting acquainted with the contemporary language, much of the academic literature concerning older forms of the language are in modern Japanese. And it wouldn’t make sense to avoid them otherwise either, it’s much easier to go backwards from something that is certain than to start from conjectures and dubious reconstructions

4. Why start with classical Japanese? I thought it was actually much more complex, than modern Japanese. It would probably be much easier to learn modern Japanese first, and then much easier to apply this knowledge to learn classic Japanese.

5. Because there’s no decent classical Japanese – English dictionary. So, even if you learnt the grammar you wouldn’t be able to use a dictionary.

   Frankly even classical Japanese – modern japanese dictionaries are terrible and pretty small.
   I say that as someone who studied Latin and Ancient greek for 5 years as subjects in high school, and knows what a decent dictionary looks like.

6. Chad zimmermann utube classic japanese text books any they any good?