Not really. Ancient Chinese poems as far back as 3000 years ago are still required materials for recitation by Chinese school children. Any educated modern Chinese can read and understand ancient Chinese text.
This is true.
> Any educated modern Chinese can read and understand ancient Chinese text.
This is false. Try them on something they haven't seen before.
Furthermore, just as modern Chinese who have studied ancient Chinese can read it, modern Italians who have studied Latin can read that, too. In fact, modern Italians who have studied ancient Chinese can even read that! That doesn't mean their knowledge of Italian is helpful; it isn't.
However, I have first hand knowledge that modern educated Chinese can read ancient Chinese text, which by definition means reading text they have not seen before.
The Chinese writing system changed very little since Han dynasty. Even with the mainland Chinese's simplified Chinese system, most mainland Chinese can still read traditional Chinese without special training. Because the simplification was mostly codifying the existent shortcuts in ordinary people's hand-writings.
( http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=24459 ) and also a detailed answer from an otherwise-anonymous stackoverflow user: http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/15452/can-chines...
The way the classic Chinese was written has always been different from everyday vernacular Chinese. This has been true for every generation of Chinese learners since ancient times.
How people spoke Chinese have changed over the years dramatically. I don't think the ancient ways of speaking Chinese is understandable by modern Chinese. However, the way the language is written in formal setting has changed little up to the end of Qing dynasty in 1912.
An education in Chinese means to learn how to read these traditional Chinese writings. This education is still enforced today in modern China, hence my claim that an educated modern Chinese person can still read them and understand them. For example, a part of the Chinese college entrance exam requires the students to read an unseen piece of traditional Chinese text, and answer questions about it. During the exam, some enterprising students could even write their essays entirely in classic Chinese, garnering wide circulations on the internet.
Regardless, please note that of the 9 students, 2 were from China and a third was from Hong Kong.
There's a serious conflict here with your simultaneous claim that college graduates aren't yet "educated".
Granted, there are always students for one reason or another claimed that they have leaned nothing from school. It's either a false claim, or if that's true, calling them educated would be a stretch, isn't it?
The first answer said exactly the same thing as I said: the understanding of classic Chinese is part of the modern Chinese education, and is enforced by the state administrated college entrance exam, which is arguably the most important thing in determining a pupil's life prospect.
- You might be confusing the ability to pronounce a sentence with the ability to understand the meaning of a sentence. As here, in "Even with the mainland Chinese's simplified Chinese system, most mainland Chinese can still read traditional Chinese without special training. Because the simplification was mostly codifying the existent shortcuts in ordinary people's hand-writings." This confuses "traditional Chinese", the spelling system from before 1950, with Middle Chinese, the language Wang Anshi wrote in. It is much like saying that the Romans didn't have difficulty reading Greek because their alphabet is derived from the Greek alphabet. It happens that Wang Anshi wrote using traditional character forms; that is unrelated to his language. For another example, the opening couplet from Jabberwocky is in faux English:
'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
did gyre and gimble in the wabe
- You might be suffering from a cognitive illusion.
- You might feel compelled to defend this viewpoint out of some misplaced ethnic pride.
Regardless, I can safely say that your viewpoint here is so much 费话, and your "firsthand knowledge" is either a lie or stunningly nonrepresentative. Though the topic has come up many times, no Chinese person of my acquaintance (and they tend to come from 复旦大学) has ever claimed that the Chinese of today can understand Old Chinese without extensive training in the field, much more than the educational system provides by default. They all admit, without feeling any shame, that Old Chinese is totally unintelligible to them and everyone else. You might even be the first Chinese person I've seen making this claim from the safety of the internet -- the claim is common, but generally it comes from whites who are blindly repeating what they heard somewhere.
The situation is not really helped by western linguists trying to force shape chinese to fit their own notions and many chinese people just following along with whatever the west came up with due to the prevalence of western cultural standards.
What you do not seem to understand, is that the classic written Chinese had always been different from vernacular Chinese. This was true even for ancient times, because the classic written Chinese is NOT a record of spoken language, but a literary form, whose mastering is a prerequisite towards ascending into the aristocracy class in China.
My grandmother could read and write it fluently, but that's because in her day a good amount of correspondence was still written in Classical Chinese.
> Of course reading classic Chinese requires extensive training, that's what their middle and high school educations are for
I highly doubt your claim that your average Chinese HS graduate can read or write ancient or Classical Chinese, given that there's not much incentive to acquire that skill. I doubt even 5% of Chinese college graduates can do it.
We still teach Latin in the US, but hardly anyone graduates high school with the actual ability to read and write in Latin. I spent 6 years between middle and high school learning French, but I certainly wasn't proficient enough to even read a newspaper, even though I studied hard and got good grades in it.
I just asked my wife, who was in China until high school, and she says she doesn't know a single person who can read Classical Chinese, despite having many college-educated friends in China.
Writing classic Chinese is a completely different matter. It is considered an impressive feat, which some high school students exploit to achieve publicity for themselves and to get full score in the exam. Examples are just a google search away: https://www.google.com/search?q=%E6%96%87%E8%A8%80%E6%96%87%...
If your wife had undergone the same pressure to pass the all important college entrance exam, like I had many years ago, she would have learned to read classic Chinese, like I have.
My wife had already read 资治通鉴 when she was in high school. She is a special case though because she scored the first in her province's college entrance exam. I was far worse than her as I was not even among the first five in my high school, but now I read classic Chinese for pleasure, just like many other educated Chinese men would do when they get older.
> I was not even among the first five in my high school
By your own admission, both you and your wife are exceptional. If your HS class had 150 people in it, you're still in the top 5%. You are by definition part of an academic elite. You both have the motivation, time, and skill to appreciate classical Chinese literature, but you're improperly generalizing to the general population.
What about the other ~100k+ people who took the provincial exam that year, who scored much worse on that section? Or do you just tautologically consider them all uneducated people, because they failed to acquire a working knowledge of classical literature?
There are plenty of topics on the college entrance exam that people temporarily acquire some level of proficiency in to pass, but how many people actually retain it once they're working? For example, calculus is (generally) required for college applicants, but I'm willing to bet that 80%+ of college graduates are not able to do basic integrals and derivatives on the spot without access to reference materials.
Hence the general skepticism about your claim that educated Chinese people can read classical Chinese to any reasonable level of proficiency, if we define 'educated' as 'has a degree'.
The ability to read classic Chinese is not comparable with doing Calculus. The former is a language, the latter is math.
In particular, the basic vocabulary of classic Chinese is more or less the same as vernacular Chinese. The differences are the syntax and usage, which once acquired, would not be forgotten.
I think most people in this thread assumed 'educated' just means high school and college-educated, which is why everyone is disagreeing with you so vehemently. Since most people have at least a high school education, that's clearly not sufficient to be 'educated'.
It seems your definition of 'educated Chinese' is basically tautological and prescriptive -- a Chinese person can't be considered truly educated until they have gained the ability to read the classics. I would hazard that only a tiny fraction of secondary school graduates each year would be truly 'educated', under your definition.
While that's a view that is consistent with thousands of years of Confucian tradition, it might be helpful to state your assumptions and definitions up front next time.
For example, someone has just gone through the motion of schools and learned nothing, he may even be functionally illiterate (as 19% high school graduates in the US do, http://www.intellectualtakeout.org/blog/32-million-us-adults...) by your assumed Western definition, that person is "educated". However, any Chinese would disagree with that.
So it's just a matter of opinion. Mine just has more commonsense: "If you really learned what schools taught you, you can call yourself educated, otherwise, you are not."
I hate to be so contrarian, and I'm beginning to question people's knowledge in this thread, but I was taught Middle English and they hammered home how it was very close to modern English.
Yes, a lot of students were first shocked and disagreed, but if you stuck with it, you would see a lot of similarities. One thing that I think threw off a lot of students was the spelling versus the pronunciation.
If you analyze Middle English on a purely visual or "literal" level, it looks almost nothing like English. Once you start learning the pronunciation and liaisons and connecting words, and with a few minor pronunciation differences, you really do begin to hear its strong correlations to modern English.
We teach students modern versions of really old stories like gilgamesh and enkidu, but not in their original format.
Ancient Chinese - first of all seal script would make it a bit harder vs modern script but AFAIK everyone uses modern typography. Then the characters used in the old texts are often pretty different to modern ones, requiring a certain amount of study to interpret.
But most importantly the language itself would be entirely unintelligible to a modern Mandarin speaker. There are hundreds of dialects with varying levels of intelligibility with Mandarin within China, and the ancient Chinese languages were very, very different to Mandarin (some dialects are supposed to have certain similarities with it). So even if it were written phonetically and not logographically, it would be impossible to understand. More like studying Latin than Middle English.
However, an educated Chinese person is expected to be able to read classic Chinese. Not many years ago, they are even expected to be able to write in classic Chinese. For example, some top communist revolutionary leaders, such as Mao, could write beautiful classic Chinese proses, which was part of their allure to the intellectual class that supported them.