The Past in the Present: Teaching Classical Chinese on the Basis of Modern Chinese in Norway

The role of Classical Chinese (including Literary Chinese) in undergraduate Chinese-language curricula in Nordic universities has been drastically reduced over the past decades. Classical Chinese has been conceived of as being not sufficiently useful for modern and communicative purposes. This chapter suggests an alternative way of approaching the teaching of Classical Chinese, based on the widespread use of classical elements (i.e., elements that correspond to words or patterns in Classical Chinese) in Modern Chinese: formal function words such as 如, 则, 否, 勿, 此 and 何, formal content words such as 道, 目, 饮, 视, 行 and 售, formal sentence patterns such as comparatives with 于 (大于, 小于, etc.) and post-verbal co-verb phrases (e.g., 来自北欧, 嗤之以鼻, etc.), compound constituents such as 朋 and 友, fixed expressions such as 心不在焉 and 何去何从, etc. This way the students learn aspects of the modern language at the same time as learning Classical Chinese, thus securing a higher degree of continuity with their previous language studies. After several years of teaching with this approach at the University of Oslo, student feedback suggests that it increases the motivation for learning Classical Chinese, since the usefulness of this for modern and communicative purposes becomes clearer. The best results come when this approach is combined with the reading of ancient philosophical and historical anecdotes, which provide genuine examples of a past language and a view towards a time period different from our own.